Kira Hegeman, PhD candidate in Art Education, received the Dissertation Completion Award from the Graduate School at the University of Georgia this spring. Doctoral assistantships are awarded each year on a competitive basis following a highly qualified student’s nomination by their major department or school. A faculty panel evaluates each nominee. The doctoral assistantships are available to doctoral students in their final year of study. These assistantships allow the student to devote time to the completion of their dissertation and with the completion of the assistantship award, the student is expected to have finished the dissertation and graduated.

Hegeman is a PhD candidate in Art Education, with a focus on visual arts-based research, informal learning, socially-engaged art, and sustainability. Her recent work has merged experiences in visual art and art education through participatory and relational installations that explore waste, consumption, and the role of interactive, public artistic sites in confronting such issues. Her research explores a series of her own collaborative interventions, which invite participants to create names and imagine stories for discarded trash items that have been found and re-purposed into interactive public installations. Through a combination of traditional qualitative methods and contemporary studio practices such as observing, collecting, questioning, conversing, curating, sketching, writing, playing, printmaking, and bookmaking, she explores what is produced in the context of these installations from a new materialist perspective, attending to the voice of both human and non-human matter.