I am an avid woodcarver and ceramicist, having won several artist grants, including the McKnight Fellowship for Visual Artists. My artistic endeavors have been recognized with awards at the Minnesota State Fair, which I am particularly proud of.
I live in a Chicago suburb with my family, and we recently started attending cons, indulging in my two sons' passion for all types of nerdery.
The apples do not fall far from the tree. I was a card-carrying member of the Official Star Trek the Next Generation Fan Club in my youth. I enjoy the star wars, but for me STTNG offers a more complex and optimistic view of the future + Jean-Luc Picard!
My background in studio arts fuels my passion for design thinking. I also have a locked and loaded mini-rant about how design thinking is not exclusive to designers and in fact reflects the creative studio process across disciplines.
Another locked and loaded rant: Love Actually is neither a rom-com nor a Christmas movie. I have been told to "save it for your AM radio show McGee," when broaching this controversial opinion.
Early in my career I worked at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, making model planes for vision impaired visitors and at the Field Museum in Chicago building exhibits and demoing walls.
I'm an identical "mirror-image" twin. This means I'm an experienced collaborator and I thought that everyone around me was weird and my sister and I were the only normal ones for an embarassingly long time.
(Photo Credit: Diane Arbus)
Throughout my career, I have worked with students with disabilities and this has instilled in me a deep respect for inclusive learning and a deep cynicism about standardized testing.
This quote from Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding perfectly captures how I think about learning:
"She saw Uncle George lying on his arm on a picnic, smiling to hear what someone was telling, with a butterfly going across his gaze, a way to make her imagine all at once that in that moment he erected an entire, complicated house for the butterfly inside his sleepy body. It was very strange, but she felt it. She had then known something he knew all along, it seemed then--that when you felt, touched, heard, looked at things in the world, and found their fragrances, they themselves made sort of a house within you, which filled with life to hold them, filled with knowledge all by itself, and all else, the other ways to know, seemed calculation and tyranny…"
Illustration credit: Riccardo Vecchio
My favorite museum is The Museum of Jurassic Technology. IYKYK.
My second favorite is the National Museum of Ireland and my third favorite is the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology