Welcoming the Unknown Together

Join us as 2024-25 Distinguished Teaching Award recipient Laurie Palmer, Professor Emerita of Art, shares her insights on teaching. This lecture is one of the key events featured in Teaching Week 2026.

Artist, theorist, scholar, and activist, A. Laurie Palmer is Professor Emerita of Art. Since joining UCSC in 2015, she’s offered courses in sculpture, writing, forms and ideas, mixed media and project-based art, materiality of color, materiality of time, and environmental and racial justice. She has contributed significantly to establishing and guiding the Art Department’s Environmental Art and Social Practice graduate program during its first years. Before joining UCSC faculty, Palmer taught sculpture and contemporary theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 18 years. Her artwork has been shown nationally and internationally. She also lectures widely on her work, and publishes writing as, and about, art in multiple formats and forums.

Starting in 2018-2019, the Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA) recognizes outstanding teaching on our campus. This annual award is an opportunity to acknowledge the pedagogical contributions of our colleagues that include—but also go beyond—any one particular course. It seeks to recognize an instructor that has made significant contributions to educational equity within and beyond UC Santa Cruz.