The Design Of Broadening Imagination and Openness: Meet Rachel Marie-Crane Williams

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams believes that story is a pathway into empathy. It is a causeway of understanding and connecting to other people. This belief is just one of the amazing perspectives Rachel brings to this episode of Design Of.

Rachel is a professor at the University of Iowa in both Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and the School of Art and Art History, and if that wasn’t interesting enough she is also an artist, author, comic nerd, and graphic novelist. As a product of the public education system and a seasoned teacher in prisons and juvenile facilities, she sees the potential in all people and the benefits of transformative experiences and access to education.

Get ready to hear some of Rachel’s exploration of story on this episode of Design Of.

Bio: Rachel Marie-Crane Williams earned an M.F.A in Studio Art and a Ph.D. in Art Education from Florida State University. She has been employed since 1999 at The University of Iowa in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, and the School of Art and Art History.

She is the creator of two graphic historiographies, Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching (Verso Press), and Run Home If You Don’t Want To Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 (UNC Press and the Duke Center for Documentary Studies).

She has worked in communities and prisons for over twenty five years; her work as an artist and scholar focuses on race and history, prisons, conflict, gender and education.