Claire Tratnyek

Claire is a museum educator, education researcher, Visual Thinking Strategies coach, and social historian interested in providing teachers and students with opportunities for robust dialogic engagement with visual culture and local histories. Claire has more than fifteen years of teaching experience, including in the Boston Public Schools, Northeastern University history department, NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science, and the Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

As the current Director of School & Teaching Programs at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Claire runs the Thinking Through Art professional development program for Boston Public Schools (BPS) teachers with her team of VTS coaches. Claire draws on her background as a classroom teacher in BPS, and her experience as a Museum Teacher at the Gardner Museum to connect PreK-12 students (and teachers) with the museum’s collections using VTS and other inquiry-based dialogic frameworks. A former Gardner Museum Teacher, Claire was also the lead researcher managing the data collection, analysis, and written report for the 2024 Thinking Through Art impact study, “Thinking Through Art: A Transformative Museum-School Partnership.”

Claire holds a BA in History and Anthropology from Franklin Pierce College, a MA in History and a MA in Teaching from Northeastern University, and is currently a PhD candidate in History at Northeastern University.