Marlene Wylie
Creative Passion in Action (Wyliework)
Marlene is an artist educator who offers varied creative thinking and practical hands-on workshops, runs whole-school projects, and provides subject specialist advice for curriculum innovation.
She is a prominent figure in the field of creative education. As the first Black past president of NSEAD, she is committed to ensuring equity and access to art, craft, and design education for all students. Her presidency signified a historic moment in the creative education community, emphasising her vision for inclusivity and representation within our subject.
Marlene’s work as an artist educator, consultant, and former project lead for Visualise: Race and Inclusion in Secondary Art Education, the first major research commission in the art education sector, has been impactful. Representation matters.
As a black art educator and practising artist/designer, she focuses on lived experience and believes it is important that all young people have the opportunity to see themselves and others represented in diverse and inspiring spaces. Her work takes a dialogic, storytelling approach, modelling the creative practices and processes of meaning-making that foreground social action.
She engages with a wide range of audiences: children, young people, families, teaching professionals, cultural institutions, universities and the creative industry. She brings these connections together to deliver creative education projects and whole-school CPD to teachers from Foundation Stage (EYFS) to Secondary Level, and to Initial Teacher Training in England and abroad.
Her teaching and learning experience of over 25 years has centred on mono and multicultural primary and secondary schools in inner and outer London. She is willing to work nationally and internationally, as well as with MATs and departments across all regions of the UK.
Alongside her longstanding creative education consultancy, she remains committed to classroom teaching and continues to deliver engaging learning experiences influenced by themes of identity, place, belonging, legacy, migration, colonialism, sustainability, climate change and social justice.
Her collaborative curriculum innovation work is cited in the book imagine THAT! Celebrating 50 years of Synectics. She has been published in various NSEAD AD magazine issues, the International Journal of Art and Design Education (iJADE), and ‘A Practical Guide to Teaching Art and Design in the Secondary School’ (Routledge).
Testimonial
… I want to acknowledge the lasting impact you’ve had on the direction of our NSEAD. Your influence has been felt not just in decisions made but in the care, generosity, and trust you consistently showed to those around you. You’ve led with clarity and kindness, and that combination has shaped both our work and our culture in meaningful ways…
- Andy Ash, NSEAD President, Artist, Researcher, Teacher and Associate Professor, UCL Institute of Education
