Fifi appointed to US editorial boards in arts, education

Dr Daniela Fifi has been appointed as reviewer and editorial board member of Viewfinder and The Art Education Journal; two main publications of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) based in the US.

She has also been invited to address students at MIT as a guest speaker to present lectures on the interdisciplinary nature of Caribbean arts. Her presentation will be one in a series of talks there about the importance of creativity in science and innovation.

Viewfinder is an experimental digital journal hosted by the NAEA, focused on the intersection of social justice and museum education. ViewFinder features experiments, invites critiques, and encourages cross-generational dialogue.

So far, Fifi has overseen two peer-reviewed publications including a publication centred on the discourse of change within the museum education community, said a media release from Black Collar Creative.

For this publication, Fifi reviewed several submissions that highlighted how the international arts community has been affected by covid19 and the subsequent implications that the pandemic has forced creative communities to confront. The publication advocates for change within arts and cultural institutions.

Art Education Journal is a bi-monthly publication covering a diverse range of topics of professional interest to art educators and visual arts education. The NAEA was founded in 1947 and is the leading professional membership organisation exclusively for visual arts and design education professionals in the US.

Fifi’s nomination as an editorial board member for the Art Education journal positions her on one of the most accredited editorial boards in the field of art education. Fifi will be one of the few female Caribbean editorial board members ever to have held this position. These appointments create an opportunity for essential Caribbean representation at this level, and at the intersection of Caribbean culture and global arts in education, the release said.

Fifi is a graduate of Teachers College, Columbia University, where she attained her doctorate in art and art education, the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, where she received her masters degree in art gallery and museum studies and of the Pratt Institute, New York, where she received a bachelor of fine art in communication design.

Her most recent work is the 2021 publication of Art Collecting in the English-Speaking Caribbean, co-written with Nimah Zakuri for In Haitham Eid and Robert Janes (editors) in Museum Innovation, published by Routledge Press. Her next upcoming research and publication includes a book on the art and life of Geoffrey Holder, which has been fully funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation.