Creative Explorations

Dr. Sutters was a K-12 art educator in an urban school district and also taught at an international school in São Paulo, Brazil. He attained his doctorate degree from the Ohio State University receiving national recognition for his dissertation. He currently serves as the Director of the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program in Art Education at George Mason University and is an Associate Professor in the School of Art as well as an Affiliate Faculty in the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD). He recently completed a two-year term as the Faculty Fellow for the SACSCOC Reaffirmation Committee and also another two-year term as the Stearns Center Faculty Fellow for Faculty Writing Support.

Dr. Sutters is published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and has presented his research at the state, national and international level in Brazil, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. He served as the Chair of the Professional Learning through Research (PLR) working group of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) Research Commission and in other capacities within NAEA. He served on the review board of Art Education and Visual Arts Research and has been a contributing member of the Data Visualization Working Group. His research focuses on pre-service practices, teacher licensure, national demography data, comparative studies/Brazilian studies, and theories pertaining to space and place. In 2019, he received a competitive grant from the National Art Education Foundation pertaining to his academic genealogy project and data visualization. In the summer of 2022, Dr. Sutters was selected to participate in the School for Art Leaders at Crystal Bridges, AK, and also was appointed to a two-year term with the NAEA Research Commission and he also attended the annual meeting in Park City, UT. He also was awarded an Emerging Administrator Fellowship from the National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA) and will attend the annual conference in October,

He teaches numerous courses in the MAT program, is the Advisor for the NAEA Student Chapter, and mentors students on their research capstone. His studio practice and background currently centers around printmaking and he co-teaches a summer graduate course called Print/Paper/Books. He is the School of Art Liaison and an Advisory Board Member for the Mason Community Arts Academy, where he also teaches Portfolio Preparation courses in the summer for high school students.

Hayon Park, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art Education at George Mason University. She is the author of Rancière and Emancipatory Art Pedagogies: The Politics of Childhood Art (2023) and co-editor of the anthology Visual Arts with Young Children: Practices, Pedagogies, and Learning (2021). She currently serves as an Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Childhood Art, where she co-hosts the Childhood Art Speaker Series and Childhood Art: A CSCA Podcast. She is the Southeastern Director of the Higher Education Division (2023-2025) and incoming President of the Early Childhood Art Education Interest Group (2025-2027) at the National Art Education Association (NAEA).

Informed by critical, poststructuralist, and post-developmental approaches, Dr. Park’s research and teaching focus on the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of childhood art and culture. Her recent work also include explorations of digital technologies in secondary art education, post-qualitative inquiry, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in global childhoods. Her research has appeared in national and international peer-reviewed journals, including Studies in Art Education, Qualitative Inquiry, Art Education, and Visual Arts Research, as well as in other edited volumes at the intersection of visual arts education and early childhood studies. She currently serves as an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Education & the Arts, editor for Childhood Art: An International Journal of Research, reviewer for Art Education and Visual Arts Research, and guest reviewer for other journals.

Prior to joining the faculty at Mason, Dr. Park held faculty appointments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Dayton. She earned her PhD and MS in Art Education at The Pennsylvania State University and a BFA in Painting from Ewha Woman’s University (South Korea).