Kaela Hoskings Named Phoenix Art Museum Education Director

Phoenix Art Museum has announced that Kaela Hoskings will join its ranks as education director on August 17. 

Hoskings currently works as director of education at Artpace, a San Antonio, Texas, nonprofit arts organization that Amada Cruz headed before she was hired as director of Phoenix Art Museum in February of 2015. 

“Kaela Hoskings is uniquely qualified to expand Phoenix Art Museum’s audience with her high energy, creativity, and dedication to community outreach,” Cruz says in the museum's hiring announcement. “We are thrilled to have her leading the excellent education team at the Museum.”

Previous education director Kathryn Blake left the position on July 1. She had been with Phoenix Art Museum in that role since 1991. In 2013, she was awarded a Piper Fellowship from the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust to consider the relationship between "audience engagement" and museum organizational structure. She is now director of Juniata College of Art in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. 

Since joining Artpace in 2010, Hoskings has worked to increase attendance for education programming and created initiatives to engage new audiences with after-hours and teen programs. She was awarded the “Museum Education Division Outstanding Art Educator of the Year 2014” from the Texas Art Education Association. Hoskings studied art teacher education and fine and studio art at The University of Texas at Austin, per her Linkedin profile. 

The time during which the education director position was vacant is incredibly short compared to other open positions at the museum. By comparison, Phoenix Art Museum has not filled the job of contemporary art curator since Sara Cochran left it in November 2013. Since March 2015, PAM has been on the hunt for a chief curator, a recently created position that's funded by a $2.5 million donation from Suzanne and Bud Selig, the former Major League Baseball commissioner. Suzanne is on the museum's board of trustees.