Educators
Laura Quintero Chavez was born and raised in Oak Cliff by parents from Guanajuato. She graduated from Adamson High School and attended the University of Texas at Arlington. She received her bachelor’s in interior design and worked in the profession for four years before becoming a teacher. She has been teaching in Oak Cliff for over four years. She has taught architecture and is currently teaching interior design in Dallas ISD. She encourages her students to take up space and to become advocates for themselves and their community. She is currently working on a master’s in urban planning and hopes to continue helping students activate spaces in their community using art and design.
Maria Viera-Williams was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and raised in an Army family and lived in multiple cities and states across the USA. She has taught school in public, private, charter and criminal justice institutions in Texas and Connecticut. While teaching in Connecticut Public Schools, she participated as a writer in the cooperative secondary curriculum program as a Yale University Teaching Fellow. She currently works in Richardson ISD, Lake Highlands High School teaching ESL English to international and refugee students and is Co-sponsor of the Junior World Affairs Council. Mrs. Viera-Williams is interested in world cultures and languages. She has studied Spanish, French, Vietnamese, and Hausa. Over her 25-plus years, she has taught ESL to speakers of over 60 languages. She has a B.A. in Spanish and English, and an M.A. in Linguistics, with specialization in Teaching English as a Second Language.
Jan Tichy was born 1974 in Prague, Czechoslovakia and graduated there from the Academic Gymnasium. In 1995 he immigrated to Israel where he studied political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and art at the Musrara School of Photography and Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design. In 2009 he graduated from MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he now teaches as Associate Professor.