Educator Speaker Series: Susie Lee and Geshe Thupten Dorjee

How can art and religion remind us how to live and engage a fraught and uncertain world?

Join Susie Lee, new media artist and entrepreneur, and Ven. Geshe Thumpten Dorjee, Tibetan Buddhist monk and professor at the University of Arkansas, for a lively virtual conversation modered by Professor Dónal O’Donoghue on impermanence, co-existence, and enthusiasm. We’ll explore how interdependence shapes the complex relationships between our physical and digital spaces, and how humanity dwells within them.

Come share your experiences as we learn from each other and bring new insights into our classrooms and personal lives, embracing the ever-changing, fleeting nature of life.

Free, tickets required. Reserve your spot online or by calling Guest Services at (479) 657-2335 today.

Educators, register here to receive two hours of PD credit with the purchase of your ticket.
Once registered, you’ll receive an email with information about the event and the Zoom link for your convenience at a later date.

About the Speaker Series

In this interactive speaker series, we invite leading artists and educators to weigh in on culture and this American moment. By examining art and the impact it has on us, our guest speakers look at where we’ve been, where we’re going, and what we can do to shape that future for the better. As an added bonus, educators and activists alike will walk away from these discussions with concrete ideas and strategies to use in their work and classrooms. Two hours of educator professional credit available with educator ticket registration.

Susie Lee

Susie Lee is an artist learning how to shape things through time—objects, relationships, technology. The journey began in clay, then expanded to interactive technologies, video portraits, start-ups, and parenting. With empathy, curiosity, and attentiveness, she founded a feminist dating app, revealed individuals at the end of life and oil workers in the fracking fields, and is now a single mother of a four-year-old and the co-founder of Catapult, a start-up that helps people tell video stories.

Ven. Geshe Thupten Dorjee

Ven. Geshe Thupten Dorjee is an ordained Tibetan Buddhist monk whose 25 years of intensive study in the Drepung Loseling Monastery University in South India culminated in the advanced Geshe Lharampa Degree, the same degree held by H.H. The Dalai Lama. After earning the highest degree awarded in the Gelugpa University, Geshe-La continued his education at the prestigious Gyuto Tantric Monastery University, where after another three years of training he received the Geshe Ngarampa Degree, a degree held by few in all of North America. For the next several years, Geshe-La toured throughout the world with Mystical Arts of Tibet, continued academic studies in the West, began setting up Dharma centers in North America, such as Fairhope Tibetan Society in Alabama, Tibetan Culture Institute in Arkansas, and Thupten Cholling Dharma Center in Utah, and has taught at various universities in USA and Canada.

After teaching philosophy for 15 years, he is currently Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas, where his popularity among the students and recognition by his peers has earned him the Outstanding Faculty Award, the Teacher of the Year, and, more recently, the John A. White Award for Faculty-Student Collaboration for work on the Text Project, an ongoing program where select students and faculty from the University travel to India to preserve the rich living tradition of elder Tibetans in Exile Today.

Dónal O’Donoghue

Dónal O’Donoghue is Endowed Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Art Education at the University of Arkansas School of Art. He is the author of Learning to Live in Boys’ Schools: Art-Led Understandings of Masculinities published by Routledge in 2019 and his writings have appeared in handbooks, edited anthologies, encyclopedias, and scholarly journals on art, research, gender, and education. At the University of Arkansas, he conducts research on contemporary art, curatorial practice, and education, with a particular interest in contemporary art’s pedagogical potential, educative quality, and distinctive capacity to function as a mode of scholarly inquiry and research. O’Donoghue is a Distinguished Fellow of the National Art Education Association. He serves as Past Senior Editor (2021-2023) of Studies in Art Education.

Previously he served as Senior Editor (2010-2013) of the Canadian Review of Art Education. O’Donoghue is the co-founding Chair of The Art Education Research Institute (AERI). From 2015 to 2018, he served as Chair of The Council for Policy Studies, Art Education (CPSAE). O’Donoghue has received many awards for his teaching, research, and scholarship, including the 2022 Viktor Lowenfeld Award; the 2019 Sam Black Award for Education and Development in the Visual and Performing Arts; the 2018 International Edwin Ziegfeld Award; the 2018 Pacific Region Higher Education Art Educator of the Year Award; the 2017 British Columbia Art Teachers Association Award for Excellence in Higher Education; the 2014 Canadian Art Educator of the Year; and the 2010 Manuel Barkan Memorial Award among other. O’Donoghue joined the University of Arkansas in 2021 from The University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada where he served as Professor of Art Education.

Sponsored by Northern Trust