Ray Williams

Ray Williams is the director of education and academic affairs at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin.  He has held similar positions at the Harvard Art Museums, the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries, and the University of North Carolina’s Ackland Art Museum.  He was named “Art Museum Educator of the Year” by the National Art Education Association in 1997. 

Ray designs experiences with art that invite mindful looking, collaborative interpretation, and personal connections. For the past fifteen years, much of his work has been in collaboration with physician educators at Harvard and UT’s Dell Medical School.  He recently served on a national advisory committee on the role of the arts and humanities in medical education, convened by the American Academy of Medical Colleges.  Ray is currently developing a “Robinhood Model” in which corporate teambuilding retreats at the museum underwrite similar experiences to nourish teams from non-profits devoted to social services.

Ray has worked as an art museum educator for thirty never-boring years. He holds an MA in art history from UNC-Chapel Hill and an EdM from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has had opportunities to study world religions, empathy, resilience, design thinking, anti-racist pedagogies—and Visual Thinking Strategies. On the home front, he is raising a young daughter and a backyard flock of chickens, playing accordion, and telling lots of stories.