Two College of Education doctoral candidates were selected among a total of 12 Arts for All Fellows for 2026-27. Funded by the Sara Chase Carlson Arts for All Awards, the faculty and graduate student fellows represent a broad range of disciplines including math education, urban education, botanical art, climate justice, music composition, sociology, theater and more. Each of these researchers works to build cross-disciplinary connections and contributes to an arts-informed university.
The newest fellows join a community of thoughtful and innovative researchers and receive funding support for their arts-based research projects. As ambassadors for Arts for All, each fellow will lead publicly engaged research across campus and within the surrounding community to spark dialogue, understanding, problem-solving and action.
Launched in 2021 by President Darryll J. Pines and housed in the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU), Arts for All is reimagining what’s possible when the arts are placed at the heart of a public research university.
Two College of Education students are among the 2026-27 Graduate Student Fellows:
mei bowyer, Ph.D. candidate in urban education
bowyer will develop an immersive digital environment that explores what becomes possible when learning is emplaced rather than contained. Through digital placemaking, storytelling and interactive elements, the project invites artists, creatives and educators to cocreate digital homeplaces that draw on Black feminist imaginaries as generative sites of being, feeling and knowing. By expanding learning through collaborative homeplacing, the research examines emplaced learning as a radical, shared practice of worldbuilding, reimagining the environments we inhabit as sites of collective care, belonging and mutual knowledge production.
Luis Alejandro Royo Romero, Ph.D. candidate in math education
Royo Romero will use this fellowship to further develop MARTEH—a bilingual blend of Math + Arte. This new framework treats mathematics not as a cold set of rules but as a living, sensory and cultural practice. This project brings together artists as co-creators to move math off the chalkboard and into the body, supplementing alphanumeric formulas with visual art and physical movement that serve as mathematical proofs. Ultimately, this work will prepare the next generation of educators to see math as a diverse, experience-driven language and to recognize and celebrate the unique mathematical brilliance of all their future students.
Photo by Dylan Singleton
