Dr. Kate Kokontis (Integrated Humanities) is the Chair of Integrated Humanities and a Founding Faculty member of NOCCA’s Academic Studio. She earned her B.A. from Yale, a post-baccalaureate certificate in painting from the SACI College of Art and Design-Florence, and her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from U.C. Berkeley. Additionally at NOCCA, Kate co-chairs the Equity Committee and has been involved in many collaborative projects with her colleagues in other disciplines. She is working on several quasi-academic, quasi-literary writing projects emerging from her scholarly research. Kate has been invited to present at the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as at various universities and national conferences, about critical, interdisciplinary humanities pedagogy and curriculum for high school students. Locally, she is involved in various education justice organizing projects; she is a member of United Teachers of New Orleans and the New Orleans Teachers’ Roundtable Collective, and she co-founded the Public Education Study Group.