Philip Yenawine is currently Creative Director of the Watershed Collaborative, a nonprofit educational organization that offers online training in Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a program with many applications including teaching teachers to use art to teach visual literacy, thinking, and communication skills. He consults with many organizations that have found VTS to be useful to their missions including the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector, Hailey Group, and VTS internationally.
Director of Education at The Museum of Modern Art from 1983-93, Yenawine has also served as consulting curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art and as Visiting Professor of art education at Massachusetts College of Art.
He is founding director of the Aspen Center for the Visual Arts, now the Aspen Art Museum, and has run programs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and South Street Seaport Museum, New York.
He has consulted with myriad museums on a variety of matters. He was the George A. Miller Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois in 1996 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2003.
He received his Masters in Art Education from Goddard College in 1979. He received the National Art Education Association’s Award for Distinguished Service in 1993, among other honors. He is on the board of Art Matters, a foundation supporting contemporary artists, and the Good Works Foundation.
He has written and edited publications on art, culture and education including Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America; How to Look at Modern Art; Key Art Terms for Beginners, and six books introducing art to young children. His most recent books, Visual Thinking Strategies and Visual Thinking Strategies for Preschool, were published by Harvard Education Press.