Zoe Silverman

Zoe Silverman is a doctoral student in Learning Sciences & Human Development at UC Berkeley. She is interested in object-based teaching and learning, embodied cognition, sensory studies, inquiry and interpretation in the arts, museum historiography, and joint attention. Her current project engages ethnographic methods and interaction analysis to explore the epistemic ideologies of emerging museum educators at a university art museum.

Zoe worked for more than a decade as an education specialist and program coordinator at a variety of arts and cultural institutions, including the Hammer Museum at UCLA, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, the MassArt Art Museum, and the Harvard Art Museums. She received a B.A. in History from UC Berkeley with a minor in Latin, an A.M. in History from Harvard University, an M.A. in Learning and Visitor Studies in Museums and Galleries from the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies, a Certificate in Social Emotional Arts from UCLArts & Healing, and a Certificate in Remote Instruction from the UC Berkeley Graduate Division.

At UC Berkeley, she is affiliated with the Blah Blah Lab (Laura Sterponi) and the Embodied Design Research Laboratory (Dor Abrahamson). Through her research and museum education practice, she seeks to understand the porous boundaries between people and things.