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Nancy Westphal Berry (dates) was an art educator who helped to establish the professionalization of the field of art museum education from the time it was recognized as an important function of art museums beginnings in the 1970 through the early 2000s. As an educator in museums and as a professor of art history, education, and museum education, she mentored museum educators through her teaching at both Southern Methodist University (SMU) and the University of North Texas (UNT).

Early career and training Berry received her early arts training at the University of Texas where she received her Bachelor of Sciences in Interior design in 1957. In 1965, she began her career in teaching art at the Trinity School in Midland Texas where she taught for six-years. Following a move to Dallas, in 1971 she earned an MFA in Art Education at Southern Methodist University in 1976, with her thesis, Children as Teachers : Learning in the Art Museum -. Through her work on this project, she was brought into contact with Harry Parker who had come to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts as Director in 1974. In Parker’s previous role he had served as Deputy Director of Education at New York's Metropolitan Museum from 196? -1974) under Thomas Hoving who served as Director from 1967-1977. It was Parker who was introduced Berry to the working drafts of the publication, The Art Museum as Educator (1978) the first major publication to highlight the programming efforts of museums. Much of the focus of the book was on outreach inititives and satellite museums and gallery programs in keeping with how to say the progressive reforms in the post civil rights era. Through her contact with Parker, she was then introduced to the Director of the Meadows Museum, William B. Jordan, and in 1977(78) she was appointed as the first Curator of Education at the Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University. While employed at the Meadows, Berry along with Susan Mayer University of Texas at Austin, and Ellie Caston, Baylor University, Waco, saw the need for a professional organization that was more directly connected to art museum work. The Education Committee (EdCom) division of the American Association of Museums was seen as too broad to be able to serve all the needs of the art museum educator. BY the late 1970s, they had already establish an art museum affiliate group and by 1981, they had formalized the Museum Division of the National Art Education Association. Berry would later complete a masters in Art History in 1982 with her thesis Picasso and the pictorial tradition : the variations, which examined Picasso’s series of paintings made between (194? And …) after Diego Velázquez’s, Las Meninas, 1656. She taught numerous course in Museum education and influenced a generation of scholars to work and pursue careers in the informal education environment of the art museum. In 1985 she served as Interim Director of the Meadows Museum and oversaw the first major collaboration between the Meadows (known for being the most comprehensive collection of Spanish Art outside of Spain) and the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid in the exhibition, Luis Meléndez : Spanish Still-Life Painter of the Eighteenth Century. Dallas Museum of Art Following her time at the Meadows, Berry continued teach as an adjunct at SMU and in 1988 she was appointed Director of Public Programs at the Dallas Museum of Art, a position which she held until 1991. At the same time, seeing the need for a more professionalized approach to the field, Berry Co-edited with Susan Mayer, Museum Education: History, Theory, and Practice, which was published by The National Art Education Association in 1989. This was one of the first publications to… couch the history of the field… UNT and later Career