2024 Unstoppable Voters Faculty Fellow Abby Galvin
Abby Galvin (she/her) is an educator and socially engaged artist. Abby’s teaching and artistic practices both explore strategies for developing individual and collective empowerment within highly structured institutions.
As an educator, Abby specializes in facilitating large-scale collaborative projects and developing advanced critical engagement skills. In her artistic practice, she uses methods like storytelling, performance, community-embeddedness, and creative curriculum design to collaboratively document institutional knowledge and identify leverage points where influence can be exercised by individuals or collectives. Abby’s projects include long-term engagement with the fish processing industry in Alaska to document labor dynamics, a series of lessons documenting methods of survival and self-actualization in carceral institutions (co-written and performed by Bruce Ward), and co-facilitating a campus-based, student-led initiative that uses art to encourage political participation among young, ambivalent, and first-time voters (#ArtistsWhoVote, co-facilitated with Gregory Sale).
Based in Phoenix, Arizona, Abby has served for 5 years as a Faculty Associate at the School of Art, Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts at Arizona State University.
About Arizona State University
Arizona State University is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and health of the communities it serves. ASU’s Herberger Institute of Design and the Art is built on a dynamic combination of nine schools. School of Art graduates are engaged and socially responsible creative professionals who produce groundbreaking and impactful research that addresses today’s pressing challenges, shapes the cultural narratives of our time, and influences systems that define our world.
Faculty Fellowship Focus
In the 2024-2025 academic year, Abby will co-teach two socially engaged art courses with Faculty Fellow Gregory Sale: ART 621 – Practice: Art for Justice and Social Change and ART 442/542 – Art and Community.
“I am excited about combining artistic and activist approaches in a way that gives us the ability to acknowledge ambivalence and complexity without losing our message, and I think playfulness is an important part of that. I’m thrilled to continue our work with C4AA to meet young and first-time voters where they are: confused, ambivalent, and sick of this sh*t, but voting anyway.”
– Abby Galvin, Co-Instructor of Expanded Arts and Public Practice, at Arizona State University
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