Biography

Manuel Navarrete is a multi-media interdisciplinary visual artist, master printmaker and studio arts educator with over 20 years of academic experience as a curriculum designer and in-studio instructor. As an adjunct lecturer at undergraduate and graduate levels at the Catholic University of America since 2005, he leads introductory to advanced courses in printmaking, digital illustration and digital design that aim to nourish, challenge and enhance creativity through interdisciplinary collaboration and multi-media integration through the use of current advances in technology. His expertise as an educator also extends to the design and implementation of instructional art programs for K-12 grade students that nurture and advance emergent cognitive and socio-emotional competencies by fostering unfolding creativity through inquiry and investigation in collaborative learning experiences. Through designed intentionality, these early learning experiences also aim to promote equity in civic agency through modelling and mentoring. Currently, he is the lead visual arts specialist instructor at Mundo Verde Charter School in Washington, DC.

Manuel was born in Lima, Perú. He attended The Pontific Catholic University of Lima, where he received his Bachiller en Artes Plásticas degree in 1990 (BA in Studio Art), and then completed graduate studies in Printmaking earning his Licenciattura en Grabado in 1993 (MA in Printmaking equivalent). He immigrated to the United States in the mid 1990s and continued studies in digital arts media and design at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, where he also was an appointed adjunct lecturer from 2003 to 2012. In 2006 he joined the faculty of the Arts and Visual Technology Department of George Mason University where he lectured until 2009.

As an artist and an instructor at the Department of Art at the Catholic University of America, Navarrete is especially interested in fostering and promoting innovative integration of the methods and tools innate to current digital visual media formats, into the process and techniques of traditional studio arts. This integration, in his opinion, creates unique cross-platform opportunities for the young emerging artist-student to express and explore both creative individual preferences, as well as to commit to collaborative efforts with their peers. Thus, providing the student with boundless expressive and referential resources to critically explore personal ideas, as well as to discuss and to exchange opinion on topics, and pre-existing content of current social and cultural relevance, through the art making process.

His professional interest and commitment to collaborative artistic endeavors within the local community, is well represented in numerous recent collective exhibitions and portfolios, and catalogued in several local permanent collections, DC Arts Center, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Kathleen Ewing Gallery, District Fine Arts gallery, and the Civilian Art Projects, among others. As part of Lily Press, independent collaborative master printmaker studio founded and directed by Susan Goldman founder of the Printmaking Legacy Project, he recently author “Madam’s”, limited edition etching acquired by the permanent collection of the Library of Congress.