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 The Unquowa School in Fairfield, Connecticut, where she has taught middle school visual arts for over twenty years and leads the school’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. She is also an adjunct instructor in Art Education at Southern Connecticut State University. A 2019 graduate of the National Art Education Association’s School for Art Leaders and NAEA’s Monthly Mentor for June 2020, Krissy served as the inaugural Middle Level Commissioner for NAEA’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Commission (2019–2024) and is currently NAEA's Eastern Region Middle Level Representative. She was a member of the 2023–2024 Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes ARTEFFECT Ambassadors cohort and has presented widely on equity and antiracism in art education.
Krissy was selected as a 2025 Fund for Teachers Fellow to study textile waste and sustainability in Ghana, and she has also been honored as NAEA’s Independent School Art Educator of the Year (2021), Connecticut Art Educator of the Year (2022), and NAEA’s Middle Level Art Educator of the Year (2023). She received two Virginia F. Birdsall grants for curriculum-based research in Bali and Oaxaca and is currently pursuing a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction in Art Education at Indiana University.
