Profile

Ph.D., Princeton University, 2021

Lucy Partman is a strategist, researcher, designer, and educator. For over a decade, she has worked closely with leadership in nonprofit and for-profit organizations to conduct wide-ranging research, develop creative strategies, and design impactful products.

Partman studies how humans experience technologies (from visual art and clothing to microscopes and digital platforms) and how these tools impact how we feel, behave, and think. She sees the arts as practical and potent tools that help us navigate the vast complexity of being human, look at ourselves and the world in new ways, question assumptions, and discover interactions and relationships.

She leads collaborative research and design courses, such as “The Looking Lab,” that integrate knowledge and methods from the arts and sciences. In her courses, students learn how to look closely at problems from many perspectives, find new connections, and design tools rooted in a deep understanding of human experiences and values.

During her graduate studies at Princeton, Partman specialized in American art and visual culture, with a particular focus on the intersections of culture, education, science, and philosophy. Her dissertation centered on nineteenth-century artist, doctor, and educator Dr. William Rimmer and how his art and teaching created experiences for questioning, self-reflection, and active learning.

Prior to Princeton, Partman worked closely with Norman Kleeblatt, former chief curator at the Jewish Museum in New York. She contributed extensive research to From the Margins: Lee Krasner | Norman Lewis, 1945–1952 (2014) and co-curated the exhibit John Singer Sargent’s Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children (2016).

Partman graduated from Yale University in 2014 with honors in the History of Art and Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. Her thesis focused on the intersection of art and science in Charles Willson Peale’s museum in Independence Hall. While at Yale, she worked in paintings conservation and conducted research at the Yale Center for British Art.