Ambassador
“I am eager to learn how to incorporate additional individuals from other disciplines to offer my students inspiration for creating artworks in response to these Unsung Heroes’ experiences. I stress the importance of narrative storytelling, especially when those stories give us authentic, and sometimes alternative, perspectives of historical events that may have been reduced to…single stories."
Krissy Ponden is the Visual Arts Department Chair at Unquowa School in Fairfield, Connecticut, where she has taught middle school visual arts for 20 years and coordinates the school's DEI efforts. She is a 2019 graduate of the National Art Education Association's School for Art Leaders and was chosen as NAEA’s Monthly Mentor in June 2020. Krissy served as the inaugural Middle Level Commissioner of NAEA’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Commission from 2019 to 2024 and as a member of the 2023–2024 Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes ARTEFFECT Ambassadors cohort. She has given workshops, presentations, and participated in panel discussions on equity and antiracism for a variety of local and national organizations. Krissy was selected as the 2021 Independent School Art Educator of the Year by the ISAE Interest Group of NAEA, the NAEA 2022 Connecticut Art Educator of the Year, and the 2023 NAEA Middle Level Art Educator of the Year. She is also the recipient of Unquowa's 2022 Jean Carpenter Winton Distinguished Alumni Award and two Virginia F. Birdsall grants for summer travel that took her to Bali, Indonesia, and Oaxaca, Mexico, to support curricular development. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction with a concentration in Art Education at Indiana University.
