Joint Online Learning Initiative (JOLI)

In March 2020 when the world closed for COVID, my contribution was the Joint Online Learning Initiative (JOLI). JOLI was a digital/virtual collaborative educational outreach initiative of The Grace Museum, National Center for Illustrated Literature, Center for Contemporary Arts, Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, Old Jail Art Center, and the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum - of which I led.

I coordinated, created, and edited over 200 diverse educational videos from 2020-2021. Together, we provided daily high-quality museum educational content from accredited museums from our homes, offices, collections. We stepped into the gap to keep the museums “open” and publicly available for all.

This initiative was ultimately awarded a Gold MEDIA INNOVATION & EXCELLENCE AWARD from the Texas Association of Museums. Many of these programs extended for years beyond COVID and opened up new ideas and audiences for all of the participant museums - rethinking how we can interpret and share our collections.