Born in 1943 in Fresno, California Lives and works in University Park, Pennsylvania Garoian received his BA and MA from California State University, Fresno (1968, 1969), and his PhD in Education from Stanford University (1984). He is currently professor of Art Education in the School of Visual Arts at Penn State University. A performance artist since 1970, he introduced exploratory, experimental, and improvisational processes of art making and teaching in his visual arts studio and art history courses at Los Altos High School (1969-1986). In his book Performing Pedagogy: Toward an Art of Politics (SUNY, 1999), Garoian conceptualizes several of the live events that he and students performed at the high school and those performed by his students at Penn State University as critical pedagogy. In Spectacle Pedagogy: Art, Politics, and Visual Culture (SUNY, 2008), Garoian and co-author Yvonne Gaudelius use the narratives of collage, montage, assemblage, and performance art to expose, examine, and critique the pervasive influence of visual culture. In his most recent book, The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Research and Practice (SUNY, 2013), Garoian characterizes the performative processes of art research and practice as prosthetic pedagogy: the enabling of learners to explore, experiment, and improvise multiple associations, correspondences, and connections between and among their own lived experiences and those of others.