Contact: Justin Baker-Rojas
Email: jbaker@fuzzyimagemedia.com
INTERNATIONAL VISUAL LITERACY ASSOCIATION ANNOUNCES SPECIAL CONTRIBUTION AWARD WINNER
Urbana-Champaign, Illinois – Douglas Pontsler, Chairman and Managing Director, COVE: Center for Visual Expertise, was awarded the International Visual Literacy Association’s (IVLA) Special Contribution Award at the 55th annual conference held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this October.
This award honors non-member persons, institutions, or organizations making outstanding contributions either to the Association or to the furthering of visual literacy in research, education, publication, or creative productions. COVE®: Center of Visual Expertise was created by the Toledo Museum of Art for the purpose of applying lessons from art education, and specifically visual literacy, to industrial and service organizations with a focus on safety. COVE’s cutting-edge visual literacy curriculum has put theory into practice, working with major organizations to drive success at every level by implementing strategies for seeing better in the workplace. From the shop floor to the boardroom, the strategic value of becoming more visually literate has helped organizations achieve the next step-change improvement in safety performance. Since its inception, COVE has partnered with the National Safety Council, Campbell Institute, Fisher Improvement Technologies, Bowers Management Analytics, and many others to advance the development, delivery, and application of visual literacy to improve safety performance. Since 2016, COVE has leveraged visual literacy to train over an estimated 2,500 environmental health and safety professionals, both in museums, at conferences and virtual delivery. As thought leaders, COVE has published case studies with Cummins, Owens Corning, Turner Lathrop, and DTE Energy as well as white papers and resources that illustrate the impact of their work and serve to further visual literacy. COVE is the first organization that made the connection between visual literacy and how an art-based curriculum can be relevant to workplace applications.
Pontsler is one of five winners of this award since 1996. Winners are selected by an awards committee comprised of IVLA members. For any questions in the meantime, contact Dr. Kazuyo Kubo, Awards Committee Chair, at kkubo@lesley.edu.
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Founded in 1968, the International Visual Literacy Association is an interdisciplinary organization of professionals working toward a fuller understanding of the way we derive meaning from what we see and the way we interact with our visual environment. For more information about IVLA, please visit https://ivla.org/.