Laurel Reed Pavic

Laurel Reed Pavic is an art historian and unapologetic generalist. She is committed to fostering and contributing to Portland and Oregon’s art ecosystem. In addition to teaching at PNCA, she is the Visual Arts Editor at Oregon ArtsWatch and often writes reviews and essays for that site. She aims to create classroom environments that are full of lively conversation and vibrant collaborative learning.

Her doctoral research involved aggregating and analyzing scholarship related to painters active in Dalmatia in the 15th and 16th centuries. Scholarship about these artists varied widely, with different artists, traditions, and even artworks championed at different times according to the interests of the historian and the larger political climate of the time. In other words, the same artists and objects were used to tell different stories. Though her focus has shifted away from Dalmatia specifically, the way that art figures in narratives about cultural patrimony, nationalism, and identity remains a core interest.

Dr. Reed Pavic loves to cook, though her school-aged children deem much of what she makes barely edible. She dreams of the day her children realize she is a good cook. She plays the piano (poorly) and swims whenever the opportunity presents itself, most often in the pool but preferably in 74-degree+ ocean bays (cold water isn’t her thing and she finds the open ocean intimidating).