Recent Art Ed doctoral alum wins NAEA Eisner Doctoral Research Award

Ye Sul Park, who received her Ph.D. in art education from Penn State in December 2025, is the recipient of the 2026 National Art Education Association (NAEA) Elliot Eisner Doctoral Research Award. The award recognizes the value of doctoral research to the profession of art education and its related disciplines, advocates on behalf of such research, and fosters continued support of doctoral research in art education.

Park’s dissertation examines how a critical AI arts curriculum that she developed for a college-level general education course can foster students’ critical awareness of the sociopolitical implications of AI, offering a form of resistance to the power structures embedded in AI-generated outputs. Her findings indicate the curriculum enabled students to connect their lived experiences with explorations of algorithmic processes, leading them to recognize how AI systems reflect and reproduce social ideologies and biases through embodied engagements.

“My dissertation argues that developing critical awareness of AI through the arts is not merely about learning how AI works, but about feeling and inhabiting how power operates through AI,” said Park. “By situating artmaking as a mode of inquiry into sociotechnical systems, this research demonstrates how artistic processes can materialize the invisible operations of algorithms and reclaim agency in shaping human–technology relationships.”

Park won Penn State’s Harold F. Martin Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Award in spring 2025.