Biography
Dr. Powell is UF's Director of Graduate Studies for the Art Education Program Online, and Affiliate Faculty for the Center for Latin American Studies. She currently explores global initiatives in arts practice and pedagogy. She has held positions and has also taught Art Education at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Eastern Washington University, and served as Special Appointed Faculty and Visiting Scholar at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston researching and teaching in Arts and Medicine.
On the international front she conducts the majority of her research in Guatemala, and has recently served as a Jewish National Fund Fellow to Israel, and in the past a Fulbright Scholar at the Iceland Academy for the Arts-Listáhaskóli Íslands, an exchange scholar to Beijing Foreign Studies University, an NAEA delegate to Cuba, an invited artist-scholar to the Freies Atelierhaus Schaumbad, participated in a faculty exchange at Uni-Graz (Karl-Franzens Universität Graz) in Graz, Austria, (for her video click here), and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow to Alaska and British Columbia. She exhibits nationally and internationally-Vancouver, B.C., Austria, Iceland, Croatia, Guatemala, and recently more nationally in Wyoming, and Florida. Her sculpture, Voices of Our Ancestors, is on permanent loan to the Depot Museum in Morrilton, Arkansas, and tells the story of her ancestor Diodema born on the Trail of Tears. (AKA Dr. Heidi Mullins) See her recent video from the UF's 53rd Studio faculty exhibtion at the Harn Museum and her joint talk about transcultural engagements.
She is an artist and scholar of Native American (Lenni Lenape) and Norwegian descent, her more recent scholarly research emphasizes Narrative Inquiry and Experienced-Based research methods, addressing pedagogy in arts education, medicine and arts integration, indigenous identities, art cultures, and art- based research, exploring the theoretical and practical ideas of how the arts reframe pre-conceived notions in learning environments. These methodologies are by nature interdisciplinary and re-exam claims of plurality, viability, and canon as a form of cultural positioning in the arts and arts pedagogy and practice. Her most recent publication is titled The Alfombras: Creative Acts of Cultural Memory, (Powell, H. C., 2018, International Journal of Education Through Art, 14:3, pp. 385–92, doi: 10.1386/eta.14.3.385_1), and a book chapter Becoming a Curator of Memories: Memorializing Memory as Place in Art Making for Art Education in Revitalizing History (Vernon Press).
Her creative work focuses on indigenous and isolated histories and their relationship to contemporary society as landscape. Foundational to her creative work is the notion of “story” which re-emphasizes the conflictual and the consensual in society, constructing and de-constructing daily identity where the personal, collective, and cultural converge. She says, “for me, art making is a way of adding original dialogue and new ideas, to artistic narratives of knowledge that demonstrate how individual truth, imagination, and experience work together.”
She was recently nominated for the UF Diversity Champion award, received Art Educator of the year in Higher Education for TAEA. Dr. Powell Received her undergraduate degree in Music Performance and Music Education and her M. Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction (Art Education) and Ed.D. in Curriculum and Instruction (Art Education).