Hedy Sissely Cordero Barrios

I am a visual artist and international educator with more than 25 years of experience working at the intersection of **art, education, creativity and intercultural learning**. My professional journey has taken me through Uruguay, Argentina, Germany, India and Brazil, allowing me to work within diverse educational, artistic and cultural environments.

As an artist, I have developed an interdisciplinary practice encompassing painting, sculpture, installation and conceptual projects, exploring questions around perception, identity, boundaries, consciousness and the human condition. Alongside my artistic practice, I have worked extensively in art education, developing creative learning experiences for children, young people and adults in international and bilingual contexts.

Since 2005, I have worked within the **International Baccalaureate (IB)** framework, teaching Visual Arts across PYP, MYP and Diploma Programme contexts. I have also worked as an IB Visual Arts Diploma Examiner since 2017 and as an IBEN Workshop Leader and facilitator, designing and leading professional learning experiences for educators. These experiences have strengthened my ability to facilitate inquiry, dialogue, experimentation and collaborative learning across different audiences and cultural contexts.

My professional background also includes experience in **galleries, museums, curatorial projects and cultural tourism**, where I have developed and coordinated artistic and cultural experiences for different publics. This combination of artistic practice, education and cultural engagement has shaped my particular interest in creating meaningful encounters between people and art.

More recently, I have been developing **ECO-Creativity Workshops**, a body of experiential proposals that explores creativity not simply as a skill to be acquired, but as a fundamental human capacity that needs the right conditions to flourish.

ECO-Creativity brings together **artistic practice, play, imagination, observation, mindfulness, embodied experience and collaborative processes** to create environments in which people can reconnect with curiosity, presence and their own capacity to generate new ideas. The workshops can be adapted to museums, cultural institutions, educational communities, companies and other organisations, working with different age groups and professional profiles.

The underlying premise is that creativity is not limited to artistic production. It is a way of perceiving, questioning, connecting and responding to the world. When people are given the opportunity to experiment without fear of failure, to look from different perspectives and to engage with others through creative processes, new forms of learning, wellbeing, communication and innovation can emerge.

Through ECO-Creativity, I am particularly interested in creating **spaces where art becomes an experience rather than simply an object of contemplation**, a space for encounter, dialogue, reflection and transformation.

My work therefore sits naturally between **artistic creation, education, cultural mediation and human development**, with a strong commitment to diversity, curiosity, ethical practice and the belief that creative environments can contribute to more meaningful ways of learning, working and living.