Billie Lee

Education

MFA, Yale University

BFA, Rhode Island School of Design

Billie Lee (she/they) is an artist, educator, and writer working at the intersection of art, pedagogy, and social change. Her arts practice includes painting, video, and a documentary film project, Moving Home, that premiered at the Hawaii International Film Festival in 2012.  She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from Yale University, and her recent reflections on race and critical discourse in MFA education can be found in “On Performing the Critical” in the anthology Beyond Critique: Contemporary Art in Theory, Practice, and Instruction (Bloomsbury, 2017).

As an educator, she has taught diverse audiences in a variety of settings including the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, University of New Haven, Queens Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, and in New York City public schools as a teaching artist. She was also the inaugural Associate Curator of Education at Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture, and Design in Honolulu, Hawaii. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the Hartford Art School and was a Jackie McLean fellow from 2018-2019. 

As a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Lee’s dissertation project examines the intersection of race, identity, and cultural politics in contemporary art and education.