bio
Short
Joanna Pottle is a visual artist, researcher, writer, educator, and community gatherer based in Kraków since 2019, originally from Richmond, Virginia, US. She is an alumna of The Fulbright Program to Poland (2019-2020/21), the Kosciuszko Foundation and Humanity in Action (2022-2023). Joanna’s work aims to facilitate meaningful intersections of visual art, social practice, cross-cultural dialogue, and research-based interventions. She holds a BFA in Studio Art, BA in Art History with an Art Education Specialization, and earned an MA at Jagiellonian University to research the intersection of art in public space, cultural / dissonant heritage, collective memory and identity, and democracy. She has exhibited and worked internationally and she has freelanced with a number of businesses, institutions, non-profits, and organizations including with Contemporary LYNX Art Magazine as a writer. She currently serves as the Community Engagement Manager at Humanity in Action, an international nonprofit leadership development organization offering transformative educational programs rooted in cross-cultural dialogue.
Full
Joanna Pottle (she/her) is an American visual artist, educator, researcher, writer, and community gatherer based in Kraków, Poland. She is an alum of several fellowship programs including the U.S. Fulbright Program to Poland (2019-2020/21), the Kosciuszko Foundation and Humanity in Action (2022-23). She holds a BFA in Studio Art, BA in Art History with an Art Education Track, earning an MA at the Jagiellonian University to research the intersection of art in public space, cultural / dissonant heritage, collective memory and identity, and democracy. Joanna has worked and exhibited internationally, including a US Embassy in Poland grant "Solidarity Project" (2020-2021), the International Mark Rothko Painting Symposium (Latvia, 2021), The Old School Residency (Bulgaria, 2022), the Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund “Migrating Memoryscapes” (Poland, 2023), CEC Artslink Art Prospect Network Residency with Open Place (Poland, 2023), and La Casa Movil Art Residency (Angodonales, Cadiz, Spain 2024).
Joanna’s work aims to nurture intersections of visual art, social practice, and research-based interventions. Within her capacity as a visual artist, Joanna’s work spans various media including drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, installations, audio/visual, photo/film. Her research foci often emerge in the studio through topics such as practices of care, checks and balances of democracy, cultural (dissonant) heritage, belonging and identity, cross-cultural dialogue and peacebuilding, mapping, public space, and identifying visual meeting points of body, mind, and memory/cultural/sociopolitical/physical landscape through abstraction. She’s been focused on exploring concepts such as “memoryscapes” which can be defined as 1) spatial representations socially-shared memory, 2) the action of listening to located oral accounts as a way to map individual and collective stories, and 3) a way to trace both the past and present cultural landscape.
Additionally, she has freelanced with a number of businesses, institutions, non-profits, and organizations including with Contemporary LYNX Art Magazine as a writer (2022-current), English Language School Oxford House as a tutor, editor, and proofreader (2020-2023), as a cross-cultural facilitator with US Department of State Funded programs The Global Youth Village and TechGirls (2017, 2020-2021), with American Councils Poland, FLEX Program as a Pre-Departure Orientation (PDO) Teacher (2023), with VOICE Amplified to conduct workshops for humanitarian aid workers seeking professional development in English for grant writing, presentation, and networking purposes (2023). She also volunteers for the US-Polish Fulbright Commission as an application reviewer and orientation lead (2021-current).
Her background in formal and informal education, community building, and cross-cultural dialogue shows up across various fellowships, residencies, grant projects, and more recently in her capacity as a Community Engagement Manager with Humanity in Action (since 2023), an international leadership development organization offering transformative educational programs rooted in cross-cultural dialogue. In this role, Joanna facilitates community outreach and educational opportunities internationally for the alumni community across the organization's 6 offices throughout Europe and the USA (Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Copenhagen, Denmark, Berlin, Germany, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Warsaw, Poland, New York, United States, and internationally). This has included numerous projects including facilitating webinars and panels as well as a Call for Contributions around the UN Summit of the Future 2024, and organizing Humanity in Action’s first, network-wide cohort reunions to bring together its alumni network of over 3000+ members across 25 years of programming.