Lisa Falk - Teaching Associate


MAT Museum Education, The George Washington University

Lisa Falk is director of education at the Arizona State Museum (ASM), a part of the University of Arizona. ASM is an anthropology museum with a focus on Native peoples of the Southwest and surrounding region. She is responsible for public and school programs and materials that interpret the museum's exhibitions, collections, and research areas. She has over 20 years experience developing and producing informal learning programs for cultural institutions, including having worked for the Smithsonian Institution. She has designed many multicultural programs that integrate visual and performing arts with humanities content for museums and educational institutions across the country, including an artist-in-residence program at History San Jose in California that resulted in a mural and youth interpreter fieldtrip program, a poetry writing and mask making program at the Little Havana Institute, an alternative high school in Miami, Florida, and a visual and written literacy program based on American Indian paintings at the Arizona State Museum. She worked with UA students to produce an award-winning podcast audio tour of ASM’s Masks of Mexico exhibition, and continues to produce interview-based podcasts related to the museum’s exhibitions. Through her class, Interpreting Native Cultures and Museum Interpreter Internship, she trains college students to serve as fieldtrip guides for K-12 students that visit the museum. She has trained teachers and students in how to do community documentation and exhibition projects in the Washington, DC area, Arizona, New Mexico, and Bermuda. Currently she is consulting on Sunnyside School District’s Community Stories Project. Falk is author of Cultural Reporter, a student resource book for documenting and presenting about cultural traditions. She is also the principal author of Bermuda Connections: A Cultural Resource Guide for Classrooms published by the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, which is in every school in Bermuda, promoting cultural research by students and cultural preservation. She was a guest lecturer on museum education theory and practices for the United States Information Agency in Costa Rica and El Salvador.