T. FOLEY
Foley with Hector the Dummy at the Waffle Shop in Pittsburgh, PA (part of her performance series entitled "Easy Pieces")
EDUCATOR BIO
T. Foley is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist who works out of home studios in Los Angeles, CA and Pittsburgh, PA. She holds a BA in English Literature, and studied film/video production and fine art as an independent student. She's received fellowships from the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and The Pittsburgh Foundation. She's been awarded residencies by Pittsburgh Filmmakers, Deeplocal, The Banff Centre, Visual Studies Workshop, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
As an artist educator, she has designed and implemented arts-based curricula and professional development programs for pre-K-12 teachers at public and private schools, school districts, and for college credit.
For almost ten years, she pioneered the Media Literacy Arts Education Program at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, which was one of the largest non-profit media arts centers in the United States. Aside from designing and implementing analytical and hands-on photographic-arts based curricula, she trained interns and a core of artists (college graduates), to teach, implement and co-develop classes and community-based projects.
She has served as a curriculum consultant for the Pittsburgh Public Schools, and helped to write lesson plans as part of education initiatives at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA. Through being awarded two K-12 arts and humanities educator-fellowships, she helped to develop curriculua at the Lifelong Kindergarten at M.I.T.'s Media Lab, and at the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. She also designed and implemented hands-on animation programs for film festivals and teen film school programs in Columbia, MO, and in Taos and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Her first standards-based consultancy was for the Pennsylvania Department of Education. For art teachers attending the state Governor's Institute, she developed a 2-hour multimedia presentation around "Criticism and the Arts" (a PA Arts and Humanities Standard which helps students to practice intuitive, formal and contextual/historical responses to works in the arts).
For The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, she designed and mentored librarians to teach a free, after-school program for teens entitled, "Reading Movies/Making Movies." During her three-year consultancy with Videoworks at Jamestown High School in New York, she worked with language arts, video, and arts specialists to design and teach an integrated program for students. Projects in that class varied from the production of 2- and 3-d art works, videos, installations, and numerous language arts assignments.
In the earlier part of her teaching career, Foley ran the arts and humanities studio at Turner Elementary School, in Wilkinsburg, PA ( when it was the first privatized public school in the nation). Students there worked collaboratively on video projects and improvisational acting; they also produced small sculptural works, drew, worked with oil and chalk pastels, and painted with tempera, acrylic and watercolor.
download educator cv
artist statement & bio
Foley records artist Ricardo Iamurri's Handmonica ringtone for her socially-engaged art project, Locally Toned