Yarima Ariza

Yarima moved to the United States from her native Colombia in 1994. She earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Columbia College. In 2004 Yarima became a National Board Certified Teacher in Art and renewed in 2014 while in Boston, making her the only NBCT in Art in Boston Public Schools [BPS]. Yarima has been an art educator for 22 years. She taught in Chicago, Miami and at the Mario Umana Academy in East Boston. In 2012, Yarima earned a Masters in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education [HGSE], where she was honored with the ‘Leadership in Education Award.’ After graduating from Harvard, Yarima became an Education Pioneer Graduate School Fellow under the guidance of the BPS Chief Academic Officer, and developed an observation tool to assess culturally responsive practices in the classroom. Yarima is one of the co-founders of the BPS ALANA educator group, and, from 2014-2019, she served as the lead program designer and the program coordinator of the BPS Accelerated Community Teacher Program, a pipeline program sponsored by the Office of Recruitment, Cultivation & Diversity Programs (RCD) to increase the number of exemplar teachers in the district who reflect the racial, cultural and linguistic diversity of the students and the community. In 2018 Yarima returned to HGSE to pursue a masters in School Leadership and, upon graduation, she started her work at the Boston Arts Academy as the Director of Professional Learning and Instruction. During her time at BAA she has led the Instructional Leadership Team, the Evaluation, Observation, and instructional coaching cycles, and Professional Development; as an adaptive leader, Yarima has led transformational change initiatives including Anti-Racist teaching and learning practices such as the decolonization of curriculum, the piloting of an equitable grading and assessment system, and revamped the recruitment, hiring, and cultivation systems, among others.