By Michelle Hines, University Relations
Contact: (336) 334-5371
Posted 5-11-09
GREENSBORO, N.C. - Amy Lixl-Purcell, professor of art at UNCG, has won a 2009 UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching.
She will receive the award Friday, May 15, during UNCG’s spring commencement in the Greensboro Coliseum.
Lixl-Purcell is one of 17 faculty honored with Excellence in Teaching awards from across the 17 campuses in the state university system. Winners receive a bronze medallion and a $7,500 cash prize.
Recipients are nominated by special committees on their home campuses and selected by the Board of Governors Committee on Personnel and Tenure. Winners receive the awards during spring commencement exercises on each campus.
Lixl-Purcell began her career at UNCG in 1989. She created the curriculum for a new concentration in the Art Department – digital design. The design concentration now has more than 200 majors and the program’s popularity continues to grow.
“The most fundamental skill I teach at every level is the creative process,” Lixl-Purcell says of her teaching philosophy. “I believe that the act of making and giving visual form to an idea, feeling or position is one of the most difficult and central of human acts and needs.
“Our desire to express ourselves and make external evidence or vehicles for our ideas and existence is innate. It is like our origin, connected to a moment and an unknowable but mappable past. It is extremely complex, so much so that it is almost outside of the realm of description.”
