In following half a dozen different careers, Rosemary Wright succeeds in being outstanding in each one of them. Her range is wide and deep, from international scholarship to interdisciplinary art. She is equally a college administrator and gallery director, with a strong cross-cultural background in U.S. and Japanese colleges of art and design. She exhibits extensively, lectures and publishes. Her core belief, in effective teaching and learning, values "a reality centered in the self." She promotes an educational curriculum "designed around the American cultural values of independence, competition, the ownership of ideas, risk taking and a search for the 'new.' " She is convinced that, for American educators, "centering respect for the uniqueness of each individual leads to support for 'nonmainstream' students to take with them the overarching reality of a growing global culture of aesthetics, and the wisdom to address the complex evolution of ancient, traditional cultures."
Wright, a native of Richmond, Ind., has a degree from Indiana University in design and art history, and from New York University in sculpture and aesthetics. She received her Ph.D. in cross-cultural studies from New York University's Department of Art and Art Professions. She spent 10 years teaching at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, leaving that position to become assistant dean at Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. In 1991 she was a Fulbright senior research scholar to Japan.
May years earlier she had lived in Okinawa, becoming at that time indelibly impressed by Japanese culture. The effects stayed with her, to be strengthened when, after her Fulbright interlude, she came in 1995 as English professor to Kawasaki University, Kurashiki. Her brief there covered, additionally to English as a second language, cross-cultural aesthetics, and the history and practice of art therapy, During this period Wright served as artist in resident in the Takasawa Institute and the Tokyo Institute, Tokyo, situations she had filled before in different centers in the U.S. and France.