Marina George is a museum educator and arts programmer whose primary interests lie within the fields of Museum Education and Medical Humanities. She is a strong believer in the power of visual art to enable conversation, and in creating a safe zone for dialogue within the space of the museum.
Marina has previously worked with the Education Department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where she divided her time between School Programs and Accessibility, facilitating K-12 workshops for New York City schools, and working with the museum’s Access and Community Programs team to create and conduct programs for specific audiences with disabilities. Access Programs at The Met include programs that incorporate multi-sensory approaches to museum education for disability-specific audiences, such as Met Escapes, for visitors with dementia and their caregivers, Discoveries, for visitors with learning and developmental disabilities, Picture This! and Seeing Through Drawing, verbal description tours and art workshops for visitors with visual disability, and Met Signs for ASL-users. She has assisted in conducting teacher training workshops such as Connecting Collections, held in collaboration with The Guggenheim and MoMA, and works with Arts & Minds, an organisation that enables museum experiences for visitors with dementia and their caregivers at institutions including the New York Historical Society and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Marina has also worked with The Centre for Research and Policy in Disability (CRPD), New Delhi, and co-authored, with Radhika Alkazi, a report on the status of Inclusive Education for children with disabilities in the country. As part of the research, she undertook extensive fieldwork to document the local implementation of India’s Right to Education Act (RTE) and national education policies. In addition to museum education and accessibility, Marina also maintains interests in South Asian studies, contemporary visual archives, and photography, and Silent Tears allows her to explore and pursue all of these interests within a singular context. She has been working to include Indian narratives as part of the international component of Silent Tears, and has been instrumental in securing the exhibition at The Union Theological Seminary, New York, in 2018.