FORMER DIRECTOR of the Women's Studies Program at Northeastern University, artist-sociologist Dr. Robin Chandler has traveled to the Caribbean, South America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia as an observer, lecturer, educator, consultant, artist, scholar and fieldworker, combining social science and the arts. Her special interests include popular culture, microenterprise development and the arts, the role of technology and the arts, and global citizenship. As a scholar Chandler lectures, teaches, and publishes on applied interdisciplinary research, the arts, multimedia and IT applications, and Hip Hop.

Chandler has conducted research on information technology access, production, and use patterns among African Americans and popular art and cultural innovations and applications using IT. Her Hip Hop Tutorial Project (TM) was developed as a K-12 literacy initiative, teacher’s guide and on-line course. It is co-sponsored by the IAAeC (Institutue for African American e-Culture).

Since 1993 Chandler has traveled to South Africa, Australia, and the US to promote The Peace Doors Project as its director. The project will install a peace monument in nine countries, establish a peace trust bursary and will develop a peace education curriculum for implementation in public and independent schools in South Africa and 8 other countries.

Dr. Chandler is an experienced arts administrator, arts policy advisor, project reviewer, and consultant for over 20 years to numerous American cultural institutions. Director of Caravan for International Culture© since 1980, Robin Chandler has been a lecturer, consultant, and program developer to educators and educational systems throughout the world. Caravan is a social and economic development organization which trains teachers and students to integrate the arts, culture, and diversity education into the classroom experience toward its mission of "education for global citizenship."

As a 1996 Fulbright/USIS scholar, she was based in Johannesburg for 11 months in 1996 as a visiting lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand in a dual appointment in the Departments of History of Art and Sociology. A tenured faculty member at Northeastern University in Boston, Chandler has also taught at Wellesley College, Simmons College and Tufts University/ Museum School. Dr. Chandler is the author of Amazing Grace: An African American Sojourn in South Africa, a book which chronicles her work, travel and research in South Africa since 1993.

A published author, Chandler’s work in cultural studies as well as the arts, science and technology have been published in books and journals including Comparative Perspectives on South Africa (St. Martin’s Press) and Voices of Color in the Americas (Humanities Press) and in journals such as the Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, Third Text 35 (U.K.), New Political Science Review, the International Review of African American Art, and the Journal of the Association of Bahá'í Studies (Australia).

She is the recipient of grants in the arts and sciences, and higher education including the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) and NSF (National Science Foundation) and has conducted field research in community-based arts organizing in the US, Brazil and South Africa. In Africa Chandler has been a consultant for the Swaziland Ministry of Education, schools in Botswana and Zambia, throughout South Africa and the 1996 AISA (African International Schools Association) Conference in Zimbabwe.

As an resident artist, Chandler has exhibited her work in mixed media collage since 1978 in the United States and abroad. Her work is including in public and private collections throughout the world and appears in Jennifer Atkinson's Collage Art: A Step by Step Guide and Showcase (available on amazon.com.) Her international residencies include the Thupelo Arts Workshop (Cape Town), the Bag factory (Johannesburg), and Pyramid Atlantic (Maryland, USA). As a poet Chandler often creates collages with accompanying poems and occasionally reads with a younger generation of poets, Blackout Arts Collective (Boston).

From 1996-2003 her works in collage have been on international tour with the U.S. State Department’s Arts in Embassies Program in Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa. Recent exhibitions include the Krannert Art Museum (as co-curator), Johannesburg Art Gallery (South Africa). Her work has been featured in numerous books including Collage Art: Step by Step Guide and Showcase and Gumbo Ya-a and is included in numerous private and corporate collections, including Nynex and the Atlanta Life Insurance Corporation, in the U. S. and abroad.

Dr. Chandler is Director of the Women's Studies Program, as well as a tenured Associate Professor at Northeastern University, and serves on numerous boards.

As director of the Hip Hop Tutorial Project (TM), Chandler is available for lectures, seminars, and workshops and as a consultant in the arts, cultural policy, and education.

CONTACT

PO Box 370, Cambridge, MA 02238, USA