As Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, in deep collaboration with faculty and staff, Dr. Greenblatt involved the Institute in transforming its curriculum, which is fabled in the days of painting’s abstract expressionism. Honoring the SFAI’s commitment to critique as a primary form of teaching, she recharged the import of the Humanities and its emphasis on critical thinking and folded its curriculum into the school’s primary focus upon visual art and studio education. The result is an integrated, contemporary, and evolving vision of the education of visual artists. With the support of an extraordinary and dedicated team at SFAI, Greenblatt has been able to activate a genuine interest in the idea that an artist is a visual intellectual. Various programs in critical studies now have rapidly evolving and vital curricula, a new generation of faculty with a renewed sense of purpose, and deep academic support services. The Institute’s belief in the value of critical thinking as fundamental to visual art has been resuscitated.

At the core of this concept of humanities for visual artists is a writing program that has been renewed. When Greenblatt arrived on the faculty and in the administration, the quality of student writing varied wildly, from the most complex and elegant to the dangerously inarticulate. SFAI needed to reconsider its commitment to writing at many different levels: it needed a vision of writing’s value for a visually inspired education; it needed to establish consensus among members of the writing faculty about the content of their courses; it needed standards of measurement for student preparation; and it needed procedures whereby student ability could be assessed and addressed by the curriculum. SFAI now have all of these. Evidence of the difference this new program has made is visible not only in student writing but surprisingly also in the work that has come out of the studios.

In order to analyze and reflect upon these innovations at SFAI, Dr. Greenblatt developed research protocols, wrote, and delivered the paper “Critique As an Effective Form of Learning” with Susan Martin at the annual conference of WASC. WASC is the major federal body for the accreditation of schools, colleges, and universities in the western states. The research for the essay traced the artistic development of six SFAI students in parallel with their growing capacity for critical thinking in written form. Historical and conceptual in its scope, the study followed these students over the entire course of their education at the San Francisco Art Institute. The essay will form the basis of SFAI’s self-study for WASC accreditation in 2003.

The integrated conception of critical thinking and studio education has been so compelling to SFAI students that it formed the core of the Interdisciplinary Major, which is one of the Institute’s most popular courses of study. The major is articulated by a series of “seminars” in which studio work is combined with focused, thematic research. Greenblatt taught the Critical Theory seminar in this program. The course examined artists for whom the act of critical writing is central to their visual work. Likewise, students were responsible in equal parts for writing and for studio work and especially for understanding the points of transaction between them.

When standards for writing and critical thinking rose at the Art Institute, it became clear that these rising standards incited a certain anxiety among segments of the Institute’s population. The cultural transformation brought about by these institutional changes made it necessary to address the individual student and his or her particular ways of learning. In concert with Art Institute staff and consulting professionals, Dr. Greenblatt formed the Center for Individual Learning, a program developed especially for visually inclined students who want to improve their academic performance. The Center offers a network of services through which students develop individual learning plans, often in combination. For some students, that may be a plan to address learning disabilities such as dyslexia or attention deficit disorder; for others, that may be an opportunity to address learned aversions to language; for others, that may be one-on-one peer tutoring; and for others, it may be a chance to do some psychological work.

Dr. Greenblatt has been on the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of California Davis, and the University of California San Francisco Mt. Zion Hospital. At these institutions, she taught in the departments of Art History and Art, Critical Theory, Film Studies, Women’s Studies, and Psychiatry. She earned the doctorate of philosophy in History of Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz and wrote the dissertation on the history and theory of psychoanalysis as an instance of modernist aesthetics. Dr. Greenblatt has lectured widely on a variety of subjects in contemporary art, visual culture, critical theory, popular culture and mass media, film studies, literary history, psychoanalysis and its relation to cultural politics in venues as varied as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the College Art Association, Grand Rounds at the University of California San Francisco Medical School, and various colleges and universities in North America as well as galleries and museums. Many of these lectures, since transformed into essays and articles, have been published in scholarly journals and arts and culture magazines.