Professor Feels Most at Home While Traveling

Since leaving for college at age 18, Alice Pennisi, associate professor of art education and graduate program coordinator, has engaged in an almost constant state of movement and travel. In the last three decades, she has lived on three continents, in four different countries, and in nine cities. She will discuss how living such a peripatetic life has influenced her teaching, research, and art-making as part of the “Artists on the Road: Travel as Source of Inspiration” series on Thursday, April 23, at 12:20 p.m. in Upton Hall 230.

During her travels and to support her art, Pennisi has worked as a track and cross-country coach, aerobics instructor, fashion buyer, hospital technician, nanny, museum lecturer and exhibit designer, middle school teacher, and now art education professor.

Within and between those moves, she has visited even more places, always to inform her deep-seated need to better understand how life is lived in different parts of the world.

“I have found this way of life exciting, exhausting, sometimes frightening, but now just the norm,” she said. “I often feel most at home when I am packing to leave.”

Pennisi received her undergraduate degree from Barnard College, Columbia University, and studied painting at the New York Studio School. Pennisi holds a doctorate in art education from Teachers College, Columbia University, with master’s degrees in both art education and curriculum and teaching, specializing in early adolescence.

The “Artists on the Road Series” is sponsored by Buffalo State’s Design Department and International and Exchange Programs Office. For further information, please contact Carol Townsend, associate professor of design and coordinator of design foundations, (716) 878-4986.