Natalie Bortoli

Ed.M. AIE '03

Natalie Bortoli has been working hard for children since graduating with an Ed.M. from the HGSE Arts in Education (AIE) Program in 2003. For the first two years out of AIE, she served as assistant director of the Brickton Art Center in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. In that capacity, she was responsible for day-to-day operations and long-term planning for the nonprofit art center. "Since it was relatively small, I had a chance to get my hands in a bit of everything," she says, including teaching a number of art classes to everyone from toddlers to teenagers, writing grant proposals, and developing programs. "About every single thing I learned as a student in AIE served me in my work at Brickton," she says. She "even managed to slip a Maxine Greene quote into the Brickton Art Center newsletter one day."

Now, in her second year as lead educator for visual and performing arts at the Chicago Children's Museum, she develops a wide range of arts programming for the museum's Artabounds Studio, including early childhood visual arts programs and museum-wide performing arts programs. "My days range from mixing up colored salt dough to forging new relationships with local artists, performers and institutions." It's a "great mix," she says. "As I am developing programs across all disciplines--in dance, music, drama and visual art--I am constantly thinking back and drawing upon what I learned from the wonderfully diverse artists who were my AIE classmates."

A graphic artist with a journalism degree from Northwestern, editorial experience at Advertising Age Magazine and Playboy, and four years of experience as a development assistant for Gracie Films in Los Angeles, Bortoli began to refocus her career on education during her sojourn in L.A. For the two years preceding her year in the AIE Program, she volunteered as a studio-arts assistant and exhibit interpreter at the Boone Children's Gallery in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "leading children of all ages, parents, and grandparents in interacting with exhibits and in creating their own art." While a grad student in Cambridge, Bortoli worked in the development wing of the Harvard University Art Museums office and interned for the Global Habitat Project in Cambridge, in the latter position putting her editorial talents to work on the production of an "environmental science publication written by high school students for elementary school classrooms."

In a project for the Arts in Education Program's core course, Bortoli's good eye for graphics and keen wit found application in a series of mock-didactic 50s-era posters that adapt the sentimental and simplistic images of that era's advertising style to advocacy for the arts in education. As one poster that features an impossibly wholesome mother and her angelic daughter has it, "Lessons in the arts teach moral choices and good taste." And as another stunning poster of a schoolboy color-drawing an American flag that ripples gorgeously across his wall says: "Art is for America. Free thinking individuals make better citizens!"

The children of Chicago are lucky to have a woman of such humor and intelligence as Natalie Bortoli's working for them full-time at the Children's Museum of Chicago.