Hugo Nakashima-Brown

Faculty Fellow, Teaching and Learning Lab
Critic, Experimental and Foundation Studies

Hugo Nakashima-Brown is a teaching artist, designer and woodworker with a background in painting and furniture making. He holds a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and a degree in cabinet and furniture making from the North Bennet St. School. His multidisciplinary experience spans woodworking, design, curation and production studio management, allowing him to blend diverse perspectives into his craft. Hugo's current pedagogical interests involve traditional methods of hand training leading to cognitive learning, and how movements such as Educational Sloyd can be understood outside of the traditional framing of traveling solely from England to New England. He is interested in applying such early industrial methods of education to global folk and design histories, looking not only to traditionally eurocentric curricula but toward incorporating groundbreaking historic architectonics such as the joinery of Ming China. In his teaching, he believes in emphasizing student engagement and is insistent that while assignments should push students to make work that is "bigger, more different, more weird," this work should be approached not as assignments but very much as their own work.