The academic landscape is broad and fickle; academic fields, disciplines, and teach-ing perspectives always shift and change. In these academic places, identities, and communities overlap and work together. This book holds space for identities that are often undervoiced in academia. The perspectives of the contributors serve as models for how artists work within communities through solidarity, equity, and crea-tivity. The editors, Zoë Charlton and Tim Doud, are faculty at American University in the Department of Art. Our current academic positions reflect the changing times in which we matured as educators and as artists. Our positions also reflect the gen-erational expectations of families who did not gain entrance into this place, aca-demia, because of the entwined pressures of gender, race, class, and educational background. As individual faculty members and exhibiting artists, we found entry into aca-demia marked by political struggle. We contended with socio-political structures that differed from our expectations and homelives. Our family backgrounds shaped our choices, and it is within those constraints we made our way into the academy. It is a truism about every contributor in this book. They speak to their experiences in the ways that best serve themselves and the communities in which they create, serve, and work, and speak to their relationships to pedagogy.