Donna Pence
Donna Pence is a glass artist, photographer, and arts educator. She currently works as a BTS visual arts specialist for Beacon Heights Elementary in Salt Lake City School District and as and arts and media instructor at Clayton Middle School. She graduated from the University of Utah with a BFA in 1985 and received an MED from Utah State University in 2012.
Donna Pence, the Teacher:
This is her fourth year in the BTSALP program and teaching elementary art and her second year with Clayton. Prior to October 2010 she was teaching secondary grades 7-12 Art Foundations, 2D and 3D Design, and Digital Photography. It was the Digital Photography with Photoshop class (which later came to include Video and Stop Motion techniques) that inspired a school wide film making project at Beacon Heights. She never considered teaching video production to younger students until she took a 2 hour Spy Hop professional development class. That class came at a time when Beacon was launching an anti-bullying campaign and what was to be a simple poster contest evolved into over 60 collaborative videos getting the school much deeper into the digital possibilities of art making as well as focusing on positive and successful "behavioral patterns. The project that came to be known as "Art, Bullying, and Videotapes", was selected by Microsoft Corporation to participate in the Innovative Educators Forum in Seattle in July of 2011.Donna joined the Spyhop "SHIFT" cohorts program in 2012, received her educational technology endorsement offered teacher workshops integrating art and technology at the UAEA conference and the BYU Arts Express conference.Other workshops she has led include
- Math and Mosaics, a two day workshop for teachers at SUU in Cedar City 2010, Students At Meadow Crest Hig:h School in Logan 2014, and students at Cedar Hills Middle School in Cedar City upcoming 2015
- Integrating visual art in the curriculum workshops for the BTSALP program at the PTA Annual Conference 2013, for the BTsALP new teacher cohort program 2013, invited to offer talk on best practices in curriculum integration at the NAEA conference in New Orleans in 2015.
- Salt Lake City School District Professional Development workshops for classroom teachers: Teaching Visual Arts in the Classroom 2012-2014
- The Pioneer Precinct Art Gallery Workshops, an ongoing monthly series of art workshops for underprivileged youth through the Salt Lake Arts Council
- Visual arts residencies for k-12 through Utah Arts and Parks
- 18 Murals for the Veteran's Hospital Tunnels, Salt Lake City. Murals created by the 4th, and 6th grade students of Beacon Heights Elementary and the 7th and 8th grade students of Clayton Middle School, 2013.
For nearly all her life she has described our world in the medium of stained glass, and approaches it as a medium or a prism for life as well as for light.
She began working with glass in 1977 when she was 20 years old, after taking an adult education class at Westminster College, in Salt Lake City. In the subsequent 12 years, she immersed myself in the stained glass foil technique, and soon began teaching continuing education classes for Westminster, the University of Utah, and some smaller institutions. She opened a glass studio and supported herself through commissions, teaching opportunities, festivals and shows. She experimented with kiln fired glass and eventually received a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Utah in 1984, and later worked as an interior designer until 2008.
In 2006, she became reacquainted with her love of the medium in the form of glass mosaics. The textural quality of the technique, it's ability to transition color changes without the introduction of a linear element, and the marriage of sand and glass as related yet opposite mediums, rekindled a lost inspiration. The following year, after attending a mosaic workshop in Ravenna, Italy and a glass painting workshop on portraiture, she and her husband Paul Heath, received a public art commission to tell the history of Emigration Canyon in the medium of Glass Mosaic (2007). That commission was followed by another to portray the History and landscape of Magna for the new Magna Fire Station (2011). The installation of Murray Library's Centennial Stained Glass Windows will occur on the 13th of June 2013. When not working on Public art or teaching, Donna displays her personal mosaics and photographs at the Michael Berry Gallery in Salt Lake City, and Gallery 24 in Torrey Utah. Her work is predominantly influenced by her travels, acquaintances of diverse cultural backgrounds, and abstract landscapes.