Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf, Principal Researcher at WolfBrown, is one of the leading arts education researchers and evaluators in the United States. She holds a doctorate from Harvard University, where she served as a researcher at Project Zero for more than a decade and then headed Harvard PACE, an initiative linking schools and external partners in new approaches to assessing student learning. She led studies on the early development of artistic and symbolic capacities and later focused on design, implementation, and evaluation strategies that help cultural organizations and communities examine and improve how people gain access to learning, culture, and creativity both in and outside of formal institutions.
In cities as varied as Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and Portland, OR, Wolf has helped a number of city-wide and regional consortia build coordinated systems that support critical and creative learning for young people in and out of school time. Based on this work, Wolf conducted a strategic review of all aspects of arts education for the National Endowment for the Arts. She was a three-term appointee to the National Assessment Governing Board, the federal agency that measures student learning nationally. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for Arts, the US Department of Education, the Buck, Arnold, Carnegie, Mellon, Spencer, and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Penn Foundations, and has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals and books.
Wolf recently launched a specialty newsletter “Amplifying Creative Opportunities” which explores inclusive practices—from lullabies with young families to end-of-life art-making, conducted in collaborative and expansive ways. A recent contribution to our flagship newsletter “On Our Minds” discusses creating equitable pathways in the arts.
Dennie can be reached directly via email.
