Dr. Barbara Bickel PhD

Barbara Bickel is a Canadian/American artist, writer, researcher, and educator of Germanic ancestry currently living on Vancouver Island, on the traditional lands of the Snuneymuxw First Nation peoples in Nanaimo, BC, Canada where she is creative co-director of Studio M*: A Research Creation Lab Intersecting Arts, Culture and Healing. She is Associate Professor of Art Education Emerita and former Director of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA. Her arts-based Ph.D. in Art Education from The University of British Columbia, Canada was awarded the Arts Based Educational Research Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Educational Research Association in 2009. Her art, teaching and research interests include collaboration, arts-based inquiry methods, trance-based inquiry, ancestral healing work, socially engaged art, connective aesthetics, spirituality, feminisms, Matrixial theory, place-centered inquiry and restorative and transformative learning.

Since graduating in 1993 with a BFA in Painting from the University of Calgary, Canada she has had a multi-media studio practice (drawing, collage, painting, sculpture, art video, sound and time-based installation), been an internationally exhibiting and performance ritual artist, as well as an independent curator, gallery director and arts educator in Canada and the US. She co-founded The Centre Gallery (1995-2001), a non-profit women’s focused gallery in Calgary, Alberta, and is a co-founding member of the Gestare Art Collective (2009-2021).

She has had 27 solo art exhibitions and presented her spiritually-infused arts-based research and writing internationally at over 80 peer reviewed conferences and 30 invited presentations. Her writing on the arts, education and inquiry have been published in 17 book chapters and 36 peer reviewed journals, such as the International Journal of Qualitative Research, Journal of Arts and Community, Visual Culture and Gender, International Journal for Education in the Arts, Research International Journal and the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. She co-founded and is co-editor of Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal, is book author of Art, Ritual and Trance Inquiry: Arational Learning in an Irrational World (2020) and book co-author with her life partner R. Michael Fisher of Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal: Education, Co-Inquiry and Healing (2023) and Opening Doors: A Guide to Spontaneous Creation-Making (1993). She is co-editor of two books, Arts-based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching: Honouring Presence (2015) and Arts-Based Educational Research Trajectories: Career Reflections by Authors of Outstanding Dissertations (2023).

Her art and writing can be accessed at http://www.barbarabickel.com, http://www.StudioM.Space and http://www.gestareartcollective.com