Tracie Costantino

Tracie Costantino is a teacher, educator, and academic leader dedicated to the enduring value of higher education. She currently serves as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at CalArts. Previously, she served as the interim provost, dean of faculty, and associate provost of teaching and learning at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and prior to RISD was a tenured faculty member in art education at the University of Georgia.

Tracie’s research focuses on the nature of cognition in the arts, creativity, and the transformative potential of aesthetic experience as an educative event. Her interest in interdisciplinary curriculum, STEAM, and creative learning has been supported by two grants from the National Science Foundation. In addition to numerous published articles and book chapters, she has co-edited two books on aesthetic education: Essays on Aesthetic Education for the 21st Century (Sense Publishers, 2010) and Aesthetics, Empathy, and Education (Peter Lang Publishers, 2013). She currently serves as the editor of the Journal of Aesthetic Education.

Her teaching abilities have been recognized through the Richard B. Russell Award for Undergraduate Teaching, the General Sandy Beaver Teaching Professorship, and participation in the Lilly Teaching Fellows program at the University of Georgia. She was granted the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2023 from the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Tracie’s early career was spent in arts and museum administration, with several years at the Art Institute of Chicago and in different nonprofit arts education organizations in Chicago working with teaching-artists in the Chicago Public Schools.

She earned her undergraduate degree in art history and Italian studies at Boston College and her master’s degree in art history from Brown University. In 2005 she completed her PhD in aesthetic education (curriculum and instruction) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.