Brian Kisida

Brian Kisida is an associate professor at the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Missouri. He codirects the National Endowment for the Arts–supported Arts, Humanities, and Civic Engagement Lab, is affiliated faculty at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, and currently leads the Open Minds Initiative at the University of Missouri, which aims to foster pluralism and reduce political polarization on campus and beyond.

His research has examined the policy-relevant outcomes of arts and humanities education, Holocaust education, museums and cultural institutions, school integration, and school choice. His current work focuses on how different educational experiences can foster civic skills and competencies that contribute to a healthier democratic society.

His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Spencer Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation, and has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN. As a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Arts, he authored the landmark report, Art for Life’s Sake: The Case for Arts Education.

Kisida’s project, “Identifying, Testing, and Promoting K–12 Assessments of Civic Values and Dispositions,” will assess, develop, and promote indicators of civic aptitudes that can be collected and reported through state and district school accountability systems. Based on the principle that “what gets measured gets done,” this project aims to leverage the vast reach of K–12 education by incentivizing the development of civic competencies that can directly counter political polarization.