Photo by Sabrina Xie
Combining science and art to inspire her students, Ms. Jessica Cuni has been teaching visual arts at Choate for three years. Ms. Cuni’s original plan was to be a doctor when she graduated from Swarthmore College with a biology degree. “I started pretty late in life as an artist,” she said. She began art “on a whim” when she decided to spend a semester of her junior year at an art school in Florence, Italy.
“I really lost time when I was making art,” she continued. “When you do something that seems timeless and time passes and you don’t realize it’s passing, that may be an indication that this is something you’re meant to do.”
Ms. Cuni officially shifted her focus from science to art while she was working at a woman’s health clinic in an underprivileged area, after she had to tell a 14-year-old girl that the teenage was pregnant. “I was so disconnected from the fact that these patients were real people, that when she started crying, I was like, ‘What’s happening?’ The fact that I didn’t have that sense of empathy and humanity going into it was very scary for me. There is a way when you are training in medicine and cutting up cadavers you become desensitized to what it is to be human, and I didn’t want that happening to me. I really wanted to keep that empathy strong. I really wanted to keep my humanity strong. And I was afraid that I would be forced to desensitize myself too much if I were in the field of medicine.”
Ms. Cuni spent a an extra year at Swarthmore to complete an internship at an art gallery and assist in introductory classes. She was able to receive studio time and audit classes for free. After graduation, she went on to earn her MFA in drawing and painting. For the first ten years of her career, she was a painter; now, however, she uses multiple art mediums and thinks of herself as a “conceptual artist.”
Ms. Cuni’s first time teaching at the high-school level was when she joined Choate’s faculty, in 2014, and she dove in head first. “My teaching is very much engaged in what actual art is and what the point of art is instead of craft and associated techniques. I don’t teach students to be robots,” she said.
One of her Visual Arts Concentration students, Dilan Bozer ’16, said, “All her work is very organic and inspired by other ideas. There is a motherly instinct to her as a person because she has so many children.” He went on, “She sort of takes care of her students in the same manner as her children.”
Director of the Arts Ms. Kalya Yannatos, who helped hire Ms. Cuni, said “I sensed from the interview process that she was one of those magical people — an educator who is a transformer — someone who understands that this isn’t just about sharing knowledge, but about providing transforming experiences. I think she is capable of that and it is exhibited in the classroom on a regular basis. Inspiration is the key in what artists do, so that is essential in an art class.”
Ms. Cuni is not only a beloved teacher at Choate, but also a talented artist and a diligent mother. “The work-life balance of being a practicing artist and a full-time teacher at Choate is a tough thing,” Ms. Cuni admitted. However, she continues to keep her balance and achieve success in each area. Because of all she does in every field, Ms. Cuni deserves a big applause from Choate.
