Bio of Kimmy Wu Ma
Teaching Philosophy: Embrace Purposeful Living!
- Autonomy & Imagination → Encourage self-direction and creative exploration, empowering learners to shape identity and meaning through artistic freedom.
- Empowered Practice → Flourishing through Purpose: Builds confidence and voice, guiding learners to take ownership of their art and apply it with intention in personal, academic, and professional pathways.
- Iterative Process & Design Thinking → Flourishing through Systems: Cultivates adaptive, problem-solving mindsets that challenge existing frameworks and generate innovative solutions within real-world contexts.
- Creative Disruption → Flourishing through Systems & Others: Engages learners in questioning norms and using art to address injustice and inequity, sparking dialogue and transformation in communities.
- Norm Awareness & Deep Contemplation → Flourishing through Others & Self: Fosters critical reflection and emotional depth, creating space for relational growth, empathy, and social-emotional awareness. Explore our social learning model: #SAM, Social Artistic Model. Situated activities through Zone of Reciprocity.
Art Teaching, Social Connection, and AI: Bridging Philosophy and Praxis
Kimmy Ma
- Kimmy Ma is a multidisciplinary teaching artist, creative consultant, and doctoral candidate in Educational Leadership, whose practice bridges the intersections of art, education, identity, and social connection. A lifelong advocate of community-centered arts education, Kimmy draws on her background in painting, art theory, and experiential learning to foster human flourishing through long-term visual arts engagement.
- She was selected through a competitive audition to join NYU’s Master of Studio Arts program in Venice, Italy, in partnership with the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia. With a concentration in painting and conceptual art, her thesis explored duality and abstraction through environmental materials and Taoist philosophies, inspired by her cultural roots. Her layered surfaces—using sand, clay, fiber, wood, mesh, and metal—form meditative landscapes in dialogue with the Tao Te Ching, balancing structure and spontaneity.
- Kimmy has exhibited work internationally, including at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice), Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò (NYC), W. Wickiser Gallery, and Queens College’s Klapper Hall galleries. Her “81 Chapters of Interpretation” series has been featured in multiple exhibitions. Earlier in her career, she collaborated on national advertising campaigns for Mercedes-Benz, LVMH (Hennessy), E*TRADE, Citibank, and American Express. She also led seasonal design campaigns for a global cosmetics brand and served as VP of Account Services at Admerasia Advertising.
Lifelong Learning
- In addition to her corporate and gallery work, Kimmy is deeply rooted in education. She has taught and curated public arts projects across New York City—including guest lectures at Queens Library branches, parent workshops in public schools, and collaborative foyer and stage installations.
- She develops arts-based curriculum to support social connectedness, identity, and self-expression. With Social Artistic Model (SAM), Kimmy integrates philosophical frameworks from Dewey, Eisner, and Wenger-Trayner with situated and human-centered learning practices. SAM champions autonomy, imagination, critique, and cultural agency, aiming to build flourishing, creative communities. Her work has been presented at national conferences and continues to influence curriculum design, teacher training, and arts leadership.
SAM
Social Artistic Model (SAM)
- Autonomy
Flourishing begins when individuals are trusted to make choices in their artmaking, cultivating agency and confidence through self-directed exploration.
- Imagination
Imagination fuels flourishing by allowing learners to envision new realities, express inner truths, and construct meaning beyond the limits of spoken language.
- Empowered Practice
Through empowered practice, learners flourish by gaining the tools and mindset to transform their ideas into action, fostering a deep sense of purpose and contribution.
- Iterative Process
Flourishing is nurtured in the iterative process where learners embrace experimentation, mistakes, and revision as essential to growth, resilience, and creative problem-solving.
- Norm Awareness
By critically examining dominant norms and systems, learners flourish through awareness, empathy, and the ability to challenge inequities with courage and vision.
- Creative Disruption
Creative disruption supports flourishing by opening pathways to question, reimagine, and reconstruct systems—amplifying diverse voices and sparking social change through art.
Zone of Reciprocity
The Zone of Reciprocity is the intentional practice of social connection, rooted in human-centered, situated activities that affirm identity, co-create meaning, and cultivate mutual flourishing through the arts.
Annual Art Show 2006-Now
Flourishing through Art
Human flourishing through art is the joyful and transformative process by which individuals grow in self-awareness, connection, purpose, and creativity through artistic engagement. It is not limited to technical skill or aesthetics—it is the holistic development of a person’s inner life and outer relationships, expressed through creative practice.
At its core, flourishing through art is joyful—the right to imagine, express, and belong. It affirms that every person has a voice worth hearing, a story worth telling, and a vision worth shaping.
From Theory to Practice: Human Flourishing Through Art
Affirm one's culture and identity by designing projects that center self-portraiture, personal narratives, or cultural symbolism, enabling learners to see themselves as worthy and visible.
- Foster connection by facilitating collaborative artmaking that brings together diverse voices to co-create meaning, deepen empathy, and build community.
- Activate purpose by guiding students to apply their creative skills to real-world issues, using visual storytelling or public art to advocate for change and justice.
- Cultivate reflection by integrating critique circles, journaling, and artist statements that support emotional awareness, critical thinking, and social-emotional growth.
- Ignite joy by inviting experimentation, play, and imagination into the process—encouraging risk-taking, curiosity, and aesthetic discovery as vital to well-being.