Cynthia Weiss is an award-winning artist and educator, and a national leader in creative youth development and arts integration. She was previously the Director of Education at Marwen, a program that provides free visual arts courses and career counselors for Chicago youth from low-income communities. Cynthia helped found and direct the AIMproject (Arts Integration Mentoring Project) at Columbia College in Chicago. She is part of the arts education team that creates and directs the summer institutes at Habla: The Center for Language and Culture in Merida, Mexico. She does consultations at the local and national levels to support educating artists in their professional development of arts learning and reading and writing. Cynthia has an MFA in painting from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has directed large-scale public projects around the city and is a member of the Chicago Public Art Group. She is co-editor, with Gail Burnaford and Arnold Aprill of Renaissance in the Classroom: Arts Integration and Meaningful Learning, and co-editor with Amana Lichtenstein of AIMprint: New Relations in the Arts and Learning.