Laura Hetrick is a professor of art education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
As a late-in-life diagnosed autistic professor, Hetrick is focusing mainly on autistic identity and the autistic lived experience. Currently, she is working with an interdisciplinary team of scientists including a geneticist/cell & developmental biologist and a neuroscientist to explore and understand various autistic co-occurring conditions (formerly known as co-morbidities) from a neurogenetic, molecular and cellular level, and as a result, advocate for improved medical care, prevention, and maintenance for autistic adults.
Using her phenomenological lived experience as the social model of disability context for the medical model of disability findings, Hetrick hopes to address the epistemic injustice that often occurs when researching on autistics, not with autistics. In the near future, at the Beckman Institute, she hopes to research such issues as the mechanisms and processes of autistic adult cognitive development; how an autistic’s activities contribute to resilience through the adult lifespan; the development and evaluation of cost-effective and life-integrated autistic interventions using psychology, neuroscience, kinesiology, education and more; and the mechanisms underlying autistic intervention effects, including those related to behavioral, neural, emotional, motivational, and social processes.
Her doctoral scholarship concerned itself with the emergent identity formation of art student teachers: the knowledge and cultural systems through which art teaching identity conceives itself, and the ontological consequences that evolve from those identifications. Hetrick is the co-editor of the journal Visual Arts Research, a publication providing a forum for historical, critical, cultural, psychological, educational, and conceptual research in visual arts and aesthetic education.
To date, Hetrick has published one edited book, 20 peer-reviewed articles and given over 30 conference presentations and invited lectures. She is consistently invited/accepted to present at conferences, workshops and panels in the U.S., and internationally, including Canada, Finland, Jamaica, Jordan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Turkey.
Currently, she is affiliated with the Autism Self Advocacy Network; Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology; Illinois Center for Social and Behavioral Science; National Art Education Association; the Disability Studies in Art Education Special Interest Group; the Illinois Art Education Association; the United States Society for Education through Art; and the International Society for Education through Art.
Research interests

Autistic identity and autistic lived experience
Hermeneutic phenomenology & auto-ethnography
Teacher identity/subjectivity; identity development through artmaking
Fandoms/fan art as philosophical constructs

Education


Ph.D., The Ohio State University, 2010