Sharon Johnson, Ph.D.

Director – MA in Art Education

Dr. Sharon Johnson is the graduate director of the MA in Art Education Program that she launched when coming to MICA ten years ago. In this program, Dr. Johnson has a strong commitment to mentoring her students' individual research interests derived from their experience teaching art in school, museum and community settings.

Before coming to MICA, Dr. Johnson had ten years experience as an art curriculum specialist in a large urban school district and another ten years of experience teaching art in grades K-12 in the public schools. She has an interdisciplinary doctorate in Urban Education and Art Education from the University of Wisconsin. In addition to her academic scholarship, she holds an MFA in Ceramic Sculpture from George Washington University in Washington, DC and exhibits her art in galleries in the Washington-Baltimore area.

In addition to her administrative role as director of the MA in Art Education Program, Dr. Johnson teaches the qualitative research courses in the MA program.

Dr. Johnson has made over thirty peer-juried presentations at national art education conferences in the last 20 years including collaborative presentations with her graduate students. Her dissertation, The Narrative Process in Adolescent Art investigates the connections between narrative learning theory and the narrative content of imagery found in the sketchbooks of urban adolescent artists. Her case study, Sally Does Her Thing in Mr.B's Art Class will appear in the upcoming publication, Conversations in Art: The Dialectics of Teaching and Learning edited by J. Burton & M. Hafeli and published by NAEA. Other recent publication includes her article Holistic Art Instruction and Narrative Thinking published in the Visual Art Research journal (2006) and The Art of Making Research in School Arts (2003). She is a past member of the National Art Education Association's Task Force on Adolescent Learning (2001-2003) and is the past Regional Director of the Higher Education Division of the National Art Education Association, 2003-2005. She is currently on the editorial board of Art Education: Journal of the National Art Education Association.