Teaching/Engagement — Kristy Caldwell

Project-based teaching and community engagement.

Recent projects with Queens College students

1. Home Is the Ackee in Ackee & Salt-fish, Abigail Radway 2025 / 2. Home Is a Filled Vase, Nisa Philippou, 2025 / 3. Home Is Blooming with Marigolds, Aryan Manas 2025 / 4. Home Is a Warm Scarf, Joseph McCoy 2025 / 5. Home Is a Hibiscus in Summer, Scarlet Hernandez 2024 / 6. Home Is a Silent Plate of Fruit, Vivian Luo 2024 / 7. Home Is a Basketball, Jeremiah Rorie 2024 / 8. Home Is a Garden, Jenny Mao 2024

Home Is: Illustrating Objects of Memory, 2024/2025
Forty illustrations exploring the question, ‘What is home?’ through layers of meaning embedded in a single “memory object.” A collaboration with the Queens College Linguistics Department. On long-term public display in Queens Hall. Images © the individual artists.

1. Jia Qin Lin / 2. Jiahao Yu / 3. Farhin Puspita / 4. Thais Mendez / 5. Altish Jawaid / 6. Hayko Reyes

Portrait: Person and Place, 2024
Nineteen portraits exploring identity through connections to place, created by undergraduate illustration students. Scheduled for long-term public display in Queens Hall. Images © the individual artists.

1. Gesture drawing / 2. Creating relationships from musical triggers / 3. Group work to develop live-action, 3-panel comics

Theatrical Composition and Gesture for Illustrators, 2023–2024
In-class workshop developed with theatre director Kelly O‘Donnell, designed to connect the language of narrative across disciplines. Featuring actors Imani Pearl Williams and Kelly Letournou.

Imagination-focused courses and workshops

1. Course calendar / 2. Sample warm-up exercise / 3. Sample ideation exercise

Active Imagination: Ideation Process for Creatives

Minneapolis College of Art and Design Continuing Education (MCAD), Spring 2022/Fall 2023
Developed and led a remote, five-week course that introduces creative ideation methods grounded in imagination, memory, and dream. The heart of the approach is a visualization exercise the group practices together during class meetings. In the final week students are encouraged to take steps to develop new work in the creative discipline of their choice.

“Your class was like being in Inception.”—Molly Snee

1. First workshop session in a private event space donated by Sai Organics in Astoria, Queens / 2. Second session: hybrid-format show-and-tell / 3. Sketched “artifact” by Rumi Hara

Active Imagination for Visual Storytellers

City Artists Corps grant, 2021
This grant-funded mini-workshop focused on using dream content to develop a catalogue of personally meaningful creative material for use in personal and professional work.

Community collaboration

1. Live drawing / 2. On stage with the band / 3. Theatrical reading / 4. Audience participation / 5. The team

“Scout Camp” Music and Live-Drawing Event

Channel 3 Kids Camp, 2019
Sponsored by Scholastic, this event brought the characters of the Bobs and Tweets book series to life through an interactive concert of original songs by The Bonefish Band, directed by Kelly O’Donnell, and live drawing (my job) at an inclusive camp facility in Andover, CT.