Charlie Garling is the Buffalo AKG’s inaugural Delaware North Director of Learning & Creativity. Garling comes to the museum with twenty years of experience leading learner-centered creative practices. He oversees the development of innovative, playful, and engaging educational offerings, including hands-on learning, interpretive planning, gallery tours, artmaking, and accessible and meaningful experiences for the public.

A passionate advocate for collaborative creativity, he is motivated by the belief that individual and communal experiences with art act as heuristic vehicles for community engagement, personal wellness, and the exploration and expression of identity.

Garling joined the Buffalo AKG after two decades at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), where he was the museum’s first Director of Studio Programs. In this role, he set the vision for the DIA’s creative practices, fostered strategic partnerships with organizations, businesses, and municipalities, and oversaw a broad array of artmaking programs—within the museum and throughout southeast Michigan, serving more than 45,000 participants annually. He devised and administered the museum’s community-focused public art program and led a team of artists and educators who experimented with visitor-centered artmaking experiences created with and for diverse audiences of all ages and abilities.

Prior to his leadership at the DIA, Garling worked for thirteen years as an art teacher for Dearborn Public Schools, the last five at a Title 1 school with a student body of seven hundred English language learners. He served his colleagues as a Union Representative for the Dearborn Federation of Teachers, chaired the Art Advocacy Committee, and represented the district in the Galileo Leadership Program-Education Leadership Cohort.

Garling earned his BFA in Art Education with a minor in Visual Arts and his MA in Curriculum and Instruction at Michigan State University.