Dr. Powell holds a dual appointment in the College of Education and the College of Arts and Architecture. She is an affiliate faculty member in the Asian Studies Department in the College of Liberal Arts and an affiliate fellow with the Arts and Design Research Incubator (ADRI) in the College of Arts and Architecture. A curriculum theorist and educational anthropologist, her research interests include the arts as intercultural practices of identity and social inquiry, embodiment, public pedagogy, sensory and arts-based research methodologies, ethnography, and educational anthropology. Her current research projects include StoryWalks, an exploration into walking as an artful practice of placemaking, identity, and social inquiry. Her research, part of a larger, international research initiative on walking, is documented on the website: www.walkinglab.org 

She has published both within and outside of the field of art education in order to create a dialogue across disciplinary borders about the arts in and as everyday life. Her work appears in journals such as Anthropology & Education Quarterly, International Journal of Education & the Arts, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Qualitative Inquiry, and Studies in Art Education, and several book chapters pertaining to arts education, comprehensive education, and ethnographic methods. She was a section editor for the International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, and is the co-editor, with Pamela Burnard and Elizabeth Mackinlay, of The Routledge International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research.