Joni Doherty Email and Phone Number

Joni Doherty is the Senior Program Officer for Democracy and the Arts. Because human experiences involve all the senses, the arts engage with aspects of being human overlooked by analytically based methodologies. Doherty uses an arts-based approach to research because its multisensory approach offers fresh insights into democracy’s challenges and the struggle to realize its ideals. Her experiences as a studio artist, teaching in the American Studies program at Franklin Pierce University, and conducting research at the intersections of aesthetics and ethics offered her opportunities to work collaboratively with artists, curators, communities, organizations, and institutions. Since coming to the Kettering Foundation in 2015, she has led research projects that explored the ways in which higher educational institutions, humanities councils, libraries, and museums have contributed to strengthening democracy. For example, Historic Decisions, a multi-year project led by Doherty, involved writing and editing guides for deliberation about historical issues, working with museums across the country as they developed their own historic decisions issue guides and associated programs, leading workshops, and organizing conference presentations. Doherty’s reviews and essays have been published in Art New England, Deliberative Pedagogy, Deliberation and the Work of Higher Education, First-Year Civic Engagement, Connections, and the Higher Education Exchange.Doherty earned a BFA in painting at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, a MA in cultural studies at Simmons College, Boston, and a PhD in philosophy and art theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, in Portland, Maine.