Philip Yenawine is cocreator of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) with cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen. He is currently cofounder and creative director of Watershed, a nonprofit entity established to support student-centered, inquiry-based teaching, including the dissemination of VTS through an innovative online platform. Watershed forms partnerships with other organizations focused on helping reform-oriented teachers find and use resources as well as communicate with one another.
Yenawine was director of education at the Museum of Modern Art from 1983 to 1993. He also directed education programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art earlier in his career. He was founding director of the Aspen Art Museum and consulting curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. He has taught art education at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and Massachusetts College of Art. He received the National Art Education Association’s Award for Distinguished Service in 1993, was the George A. Miller Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois in 1996, and the first Educator-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2012, among other honors. He is on the board of Art Matters, a foundation giving fellowships to cutting-edge artists.
Yenawine is the author of How to Look at Modern Art, Key Art Terms for Beginners, and six children’s books about art among other writing projects. His most recent book, Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to Deepen Learning Across School Disciplines, was published by Harvard Education Press in October 2013. He attended Princeton University from 1960 to 1963, and holds a BA from Governor’s State University, University Park, Illinois, and an MA from Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Kansas City Art Institute in 2003.
