Exploring the World Through Art: How One Professor’s Travels Enrich Her Classroom

For many students, learning about art history means flipping through textbooks or viewing digital images. However, for students in Dr. Beata Niedzialkowska’s class at UNC Pembroke, art history comes alive through her firsthand experiences visiting some of the world’s most renowned museums.

A passionate traveler and scholar, Dr. Niedzialkowska has explored museums from the grand halls of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to the vibrant galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her journeys have taken her to Montreal, Berlin, Prague, Rome and Vienna, where she studied masterpieces closely and engaged with experts in the field.

My mission is to make art relevant and engaging for all my students.

She brings these experiences back to her students, making lectures more dynamic and immersive. “I want my students to see art as more than just pictures in a book,” she says. “By sharing my experiences, I hope to inspire them to explore and appreciate global artistic heritage.”

Beyond her travels, Dr. Niedzialkowska is also a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Teaching Fellow, a distinction awarded to only 10 art historians nationwide. This fellowship allows her to integrate provenance research into her courses and use the Smithsonian Archives of American Art’s online resources to teach students about provenance research and how to use primary sources to learn about art, collecting and collections. 

While at UNCP, she has organized student trips to the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham. Several Smithsonian scholars have spoken virtually to her class, including Deborah Gaston, director of education from the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and an expert with Freer and Sackler, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art.

Dr. Niedzialkowska’s passion for art was shaped by her upbringing in Poland, where her father, Stefan Niedzialkowski, has been a celebrated mime theater artist, choreographer and actor for over six decades. Her family immigrated to the U.S. in 1982 amid political unrest, and she later earned degrees from Temple University and the University of Iowa before beginning a 20-year teaching career.

Today, she inspires students by connecting them to historical and contemporary art. “We have great conversations in class,” she says. “My mission is to make art relevant and engaging for all my students.”