Beloved art teacher to receive TAIS excellence award

By Juanita I.C. Traughber, Director of Marketing & Communications

Tennessee Association of Independent Schools has announced that University School of Nashville Middle and High School Art Teacher Emily Holt will receive its Hubert Smothers Excellence in Teaching Award on Monday, November 9, during its annual conference in Memphis.

Holt, who teaches Ceramics and 3D Art to Middle Schoolers this semester, is known for her cross-curricular and cross-divisional work that deepens students’ understanding of academic lessons through the arts and allows students to work together across grades. After earning the Meador Travel Grant and traveling to Italy to learn about processional puppetry in 2015, Holt returned to USN to handcraft puppets that scaled up to 15 feet tall  with more than 60 students. Made of modeling the clay and papier-mâché, the larger-than-life puppets of notable authors and Nashville icons have been used in students’ immersive theater experiences, in performances before Nashville politicians and community leaders that made local headlines, and drifted in the International Puppet Festival’s parade. Holt’s work with students has enhanced civil rights lessons, brought lessons on pollution and geography to life through watercolors and acrylics, brought attention to banned books, and allowed students to collaborate on sculptures with teenagers and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. And she has collaborated with a visiting artist and students on a mural in the Edgehill Campus’ 21st Avenue garage.

“Emily is always pushing into other classes to help teachers integrate art into their curriculum,” Head of Middle School Joe Bezaire wrote in her nomination. “She has broadened teachers' perspectives on art integration by coming up with creative art integration projects that deepen students' understanding of and connection to the content. Emily has deepened and widened our students' experiences in all courses, all while maintaining her own popular art classes through our electives programming.”  

During the 2020 pandemic, she created the COVID Quilt project and stitched together  5-by-5-inch squares “to mark this historical time we all [lived] through collectively and how we are all connected to each other.”

Holt began teaching at USN in 2003. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Middle Tennessee State University.

The Hubert Smothers Award is reserved for teachers who have at least 20 years in the teaching profession and have distinguished themselves in their community through their expertise in students' needs and development, dedicated work towards students' well-being, and meaningful collegiality with faculty, staff, and administration.