Her teaching and research focuses on arts education as essential knowledge in schools, as literacy, and as forms of inquiry and expression. With her background in dance education and a grant from the National Science Foundation, she and her research team from the worlds of computing, virtual environments, and digital animation are merging movement and computational thinking to encourage and support opportunities for underrepresented students in STEAM fields in a project called VEnvI (Virtual Environment Interactions). In spring 2016, she will have served as the faculty-in-residence at Fisher Middle School, exploring the arts as central in learning, truly providing the steAm in education.