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Project Lets Female Leaders Use Portrait Art As Inclusive Business Tool
First Woman in Mission Control for NASA Helps Great Wome Portrait Project Launch
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia - The Great Woman Portrait Project, launching in March during Women’s History Month, turns portrait art into a diversity and inclusion (D&I) tool that promotes inclusive work cultures, and gives girls pioneering role models that resonate.
“This is about great women of today discovering great women of yesterday, and inspiring the women of tomorrow,” said artist, author and project creator Jo Napier.
NASA’s first female Mission Control engineer, Frances ‘Poppy’ Northcutt – the return-to-Earth specialist who calculated the trajectories that brought Apollo astronauts back from the moon - has contributed her voice to the project.
“We both want to give girls their role models,” said Napier. “And this project helps corporate and industry leaders do exactly that.”
Here’s how the project works: a female leader commissions a portrait by Napier of a ‘great woman’, which they hang in a professional space; they also identify a youth organization. Napier’s production company, Great Women Productions, creates an iMovie capturing portraits and stories about brilliant female role models which youth leaders use as learning tools.
Napier asked Northcutt to shoot a video for use in her meetings with female leaders, starting this month, to promote the project. In the video, Northcutt - an engineer who became the women’s advocate for the city of Houston and went on to become a criminal defense lawyer - considers the power of images and role models to change the course of a girl’s life.
Companies across North America spend billions of dollars annually on D&I training and workshops, said Napier, yet behavioral science shows ‘simple design interventions’ – like updating the portraits on your walls – can create the kind of mindset shift that creates a change in culture.
“Images have power,” said Napier. While her project promotes workplace inclusivity, it also gives girls a chance to see their potential in traditionally male-dominated domains like science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
Women have paved powerful paths in STEM, their accomplishments aren’t well known. “Men have been the record keepers, so we just don’t know much about women’s accomplishments.” That omission, she says, has bred “a gap in our collective consciousness” feeds the lack of diversity, equality and inclusion in male-dominated arenas of work and study.
The Great Women Portrait Project is designed to evolve into an informal, digital “constellation of women” - connected and collaborating to reveal ‘the female face’ of innovation. Northcutt is the constellation’s North Star: an icon, activist and inspiring STEM pioneer who knows the power of women acting collectively.
The Great Women Portrait Project is designed to evolve into an informal, digital “constellation of women” - connected and collaborating to reveal ‘the female face’ of innovation. Northcutt is the constellation’s North Star: an icon, activist and inspiring STEM pioneer who knows the power of women acting collectively.
“We know inclusion and diversity can drive innovation and profits, but what does inclusion really look like?” said Napier. “It looks like girls named Trudy, Marie, Dorothy, Cecilia, Poppy… who became pioneers that changed the way drugs are developed, mapped the ocean floor, made mass-production of antibiotics possible, revealed secrets of the universe and brought men back from the moon…”
Women leaders are invited to reach out to Napier and view Great Women Production’s online roster of potential portrait subjects on the project website (GreatWomenPortraitProject.com).
About Great Women Productions and Jo Napier
Great Women Productions, a Nova Scotia-based business owned by Jo Napier, artist and author of Technology with Curves: Women Reshaping the Digital Landscape (HarperCollins), promotes inclusive environments and gender-based education by honoring women’s work through portrait art. For more information, visit JoNapier.com
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Contact: Jo Napier ([email protected])
Great Women Productions
6090 Roxton Road, Halifax TEL: (902) 209-8300
Nova Scotia CANADA B3H1H8
www.GreatWomenProductions.com
