Adam Nilsen

Close-up of a person smiling with a blurry background featuring a pattern resembling an ancient Greek vase design.
EVENTS + CONTRIBUTIONS

Thinking across the Arts and Design at Berkeley: The Architecture of Life Public Talks, Spring 2016

Topics

Curatorial topic page, Scholar topic page, Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer topic page
Job title: 
Senior Lecturer in the Lurie College of Education at San Jose State
Bio/CV: 

Adam Nilsen was the head of education and interpretation at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford’s Graduate School of Education in 2015 in Learning Sciences and Technology Design. He holds a B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. from New York University in Anthropology. His professional background is in museum education. As a researcher at the Oakland Museum of California, he curated exhibits with themes including migrant labor history, LGBTQ history, and Californians’ recollections of the 1960s and 1970s. His research has focused on how people connect to stories of others through empathy and perspective taking. Now, he is a Senior Lecturer in the Lurie College of Education at San Jose State. There, he teaches his students tools for understanding concepts of culture, identity, difference, and empathy, wrestling with hard questions and practicing interrogating sources of information and articulating our analyses clearly and convincingly. 

Role: 
Visiting Scholar