Anna Santucci joined the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) in the summer of 2025. As associate director, she leads on the integration of inclusive principles and partnership-oriented mindsets across the CTE.

Anna’s international and transdisciplinary work promotes interculturality, equity, and justice in higher education via participatory arts, critical reflection, authentic dialogue, and relational co-creation. She has contributed over 100 publications and presentations across 10 countries and served professional leadership roles for several national and international organizations.

Her published work appears in venues such as Teaching and Learning Inquiry, Journal of Excellence in College Teaching, Journal of Faculty Development, Transformative Dialogues, New Directions in Teaching & Learning, Research in Drama Education, and Scenario Journal for Performative Teaching, Learning and Research. Her professional leadership experience includes serving as vice-president of the All-Ireland Society for Higher Education (AISHE), facilitator of Collaborative Writing Groups for the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), committee chair in the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education, and Associate Editor of the International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED)’s International Journal for Academic Development (IJAD).

Before joining UVA, Anna was Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) at University College Cork (UCC, Ireland), where she directed CIRTL’s MA program in Teaching and Learning for Higher Education, pioneered UCC’s student-staff pedagogical partnership program, and co-led UCC’s Teaching & Learning contributions in the UNIC European University alliance. She was previously Faculty Development Specialist in the Office for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning at the University of Rhode Island (USA). Her story includes a BA in Modern Languages (Padova, Italy), MA in English (Nottingham, UK), and PhD combining Italian and Theatre & Performance (Brown University, USA) with a dissertation focused on the integration of the performing arts in critical pedagogies of foreign language and culture.

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