AVIVA SILVERMAN


DIA ART FOUNDATION 

NYC


TEACHING ARTIST & CURRICULUM DESIGNER, 
2024-2025

For Dia Teens, Dia's year-long program for high school students supported by DYCD, I developed and taught Creation Chant — a curriculum examining personal narrative, historical memory, and the vessels these stories live in, investigating which dominant stories are preserved through time and which are erased by the monumentality of historic narrative. Structured in four parts (A Ball that is also a Voice, Figure-Skeleton-Frame-Build, Tale, and Threshold), the course draws on feminist ethics of care and reciprocal ethnography to give students tools for building their own relationship to personal mythology.

As Teaching Artist and Curriculum Designer, I led students through a rigorous engagement with time-based and durational practice, threading cultural sites across NYC, discussion circles, and hands-on work — from totemic installation to field recordings — into a collaborative, decolonial framework for shaping memory, imagination, self-narration, and oral history.