Rhea Vedro

Rhea Vedro is a metalsmith and cultural producer with over twenty years of experience leading community-based arts programs.  Vedro is Director of Community Engagement for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. National projects include consulting for the Vizcaya Museum, Queens Museum, AOL/Time Warner Foundation, El Museo del Barrio, The Fund for the City of New York, The New York City Parks Foundation, and numerous schools, shelters, prisons and community settings.

Vedro earned her BA at NYU in Community Based Arts & Youth Program Design in 2010. Based in Brooklyn, Vedro founded A.Y.E. International, a teaching artists collective which fostered her exploration of best practices in community-based arts throughout the US, Brazil, Canada, Cuba and Mexico.

Vedro received scholarships to craft schools Haystack, Penland and Peters Valley to study blacksmithing and steel engraving. In 2006 she completed her MFA in Metalsmithing from the State University of New York at New Paltz, where she later taught in the Art Department. Vedro moved to Wisconsin to teach Metals in the Department of Art at the UW-Madison in 2008 as a Visiting Professor investigating the trajectory of humankind’s relationship with metal - ways we source it and refine it into objects of beauty, war, value, infrastructure, ceremony and industry.  There she concurrently built her community engagement practice as Bilingual Community Education Program Director for Planned Parenthood of WI, and with the Madison Metropolitan School District’s Office of Multilingual and Global Education. Since returning to the East Coast in 2015, Vedro is delighted to serve on the North Bennet Street School Board of Advisors, and to collaborate as a Guest Artist Reviewer for The Boston Foundation, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, School of Architecture + Planning, and New England Foundation for the Arts.