He earned B.F.A and M.F.A degrees from the University of Michigan, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. Recipient of an Individual Artists Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, his art has been exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and internationally. Charland’s published research has been cited in more than fifty works of scholarship by others. His publications and conference presentations attend to issues of minority participation in the visual arts, institutional culture, faculty development, curriculum development, and distance learning. Charland recently served as a consultant to the University of Qatar, and is currently directing a project in partnership with the Detroit Institute of Arts to bring the rich resources of the museum to remote communities through online means.