Paige Valente
Art teacher, Edna Karr High School
Paige Valente is an artist and art educator teaching AP, Talented, and Art I + II courses at Edna Karr High School in New Orleans, Louisiana. Paige’s experience in the classroom began thirteen years ago working as a teaching artist in the aftermath of post-Katrina New Orleans. While Paige continues to produce artistic commissions for public and private collections, it is in the New Orleans classroom where she finds fulfillment and joy. Six years past, she dedicated her primary focus to serving as a full time art educator and advocate of the arts, especially for immediate underserved and marginalized communities.
Paige has her BFA in Graphic Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design and is a recent graduate of the MA in Arts Education program at Boston University.
As a citizen of the New Orleans community, a culture entrenched in African influence and diasporic elements, Paige is impassioned, to help further define and preserve the practices, traditions, and ways of being, connecting New Orleans to ancestral Africa. Colonialism took identity away from a people. In order for people to understand who they are, it is important to understand where they come from- or were taken from for that matter. Beyond this, present day Africa faces another pillage by neo-colonialism. Awareness and understanding of both past and present injustices are imperative in order to preserve righteousness for the continent.