Miranda Koffey is an educator, artist, and researcher whose work moves through art education, visual culture, feminist theory, environmental and ecological inquiry, and questions of how knowledge is formed, carried, and recognized. She is interested in the visuals, narratives, and rituals people use to understand the world around them, especially when those understandings have already been shaped by stereotype, assumption, or institutional authority.

Koffey’s research examines forms of knowledge that are traditionally overlooked, dismissed, or misread. Her scholarship has considered the contemporary witch as a figure historically used to mark unruly femininity and social danger, and later reclaimed through feminist and creative practice. Her Appalachian research turns toward place, environmental encounters, ecological relation, and the quieter forms of attention through which people learn to read the world around them. Across this work, she returns to questions of who gets to name what something means, whose knowledge is trusted, and what happens when an inherited story begins to loosen a bit. She is particularly interested in subjects that have been dismissed as ordinary, unserious, strange, or otherwise unworthy of sustained academic attention. Those categories, as it turns out, tend to contain some of the most interesting stories.

Her thinking about teaching has been shaped by years spent across university classrooms, community arts, nonprofit education, youth programming, and other spaces where learning rarely follows a tidy sequence. At the university level, her teaching has moved between studio, teacher preparation, general education, visual culture, and graduate pedagogy, requiring different ways of thinking about what students are being asked to notice, make, question, or carry with them. She is especially interested in the moments when wandering attention, hesitation, making, or quiet observation are read too quickly as something else, and in what might happen if teaching leaves enough room to look again. 

Koffey holds a PhD in Arts Administration, Education, and Policy and an MA in Arts Education from The Ohio State University.