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Biography
Megan Driving Hawk is an artist/mother/educator using habits of the heart to facilitate connection, healing, and learning through photography, poetry, & traditional needlework. Creatively she researches collective healing, trauma, memory, and time. Academically she researches culturally responsive fine arts education. She earned a BFA in Fine Art Photography from Arizona State University, an MEd in Secondary Education with certification in Art K-12 from ASU, and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Hartford. She is SEI and CTE endorsed.
She is a National Board-Certified Teacher who has spent over 10 years in the classroom creating and teaching a culturally responsive art education curriculum. She has served as Indigenous Student Advisor, Teacher Equity Lead, Visual Arts Lead, National Arts Honor Society Advisor among others. Her artwork has been reviewed, collected, and exhibited numerous times throughout the present-day U.S. and internationally including the ASU Art Museum and the Tempe Public Works Collection. She has been invited as guest lecturer, workshop facilitator, and panelist for various events at the national, state, & local level. Currently she is the Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Rep for the Arizona Art Education Association, a Running with Purpose Artist/Athlete Advocate, and leadership member of Kinship Photography Collective.
Driving Hawk has received numerous honors and awards including honorable mention in the 2020 Women Photographing Women category of the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, 2023 artist-in-residence at the Tempe Center for the Arts, 2023 Arizona Art Educator of the Year, and 2025 Agent of Change in Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion.
Driving Hawk currently lives in the Sonoran Desert on O’odham, Yavapai, Akimel O’odham (Upper Pima) and Hohokam lands (Phoenix, Arizona). She is of Celtic ancestry and a wife & mother of two in a Lakȟóta Thiwáhe. Her life is a residency in Matrescence & outdoor learning through Indigenous ways of knowing.
She is a National Board-Certified Teacher who has spent over 10 years in the classroom creating and teaching a culturally responsive art education curriculum. She has served as Indigenous Student Advisor, Teacher Equity Lead, Visual Arts Lead, National Arts Honor Society Advisor among others. Her artwork has been reviewed, collected, and exhibited numerous times throughout the present-day U.S. and internationally including the ASU Art Museum and the Tempe Public Works Collection. She has been invited as guest lecturer, workshop facilitator, and panelist for various events at the national, state, & local level. Currently she is the Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Rep for the Arizona Art Education Association, a Running with Purpose Artist/Athlete Advocate, and leadership member of Kinship Photography Collective.
Driving Hawk has received numerous honors and awards including honorable mention in the 2020 Women Photographing Women category of the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, 2023 artist-in-residence at the Tempe Center for the Arts, 2023 Arizona Art Educator of the Year, and 2025 Agent of Change in Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion.
Driving Hawk currently lives in the Sonoran Desert on O’odham, Yavapai, Akimel O’odham (Upper Pima) and Hohokam lands (Phoenix, Arizona). She is of Celtic ancestry and a wife & mother of two in a Lakȟóta Thiwáhe. Her life is a residency in Matrescence & outdoor learning through Indigenous ways of knowing.
Artist Statement
I work like a busy spider,
revealing, mending, tending,
the unseen mycelium,
moving from maiden to mother,
always in a state of postpartum.
My creative practice was born out of a desire to connect with my ancestors & future kin. Once I transitioned into matrescence my work became a way to live and teach my children values of kinship and reciprocity. Through photography, poetry, and traditional needlework I reveal connections between Celtic and Lakȟóta cultures, mend familial & generational traumas, and tend to my learning about the more-than-human world through Indigenous ways of knowing.
Simultaneous Memories are multiple photographic exposures which use data, timing, and seasonal observations to mark rituals along the Celtic Wheel of the Year and the Lakȟóta Medicine Wheel, thereby creating and documenting a modern family culture of both traditions. I make base photographs during daily and seasonal rituals that involve foodways, movement, ceremony, space & place, land, and community.
Begging Poetics are poems made from a daily writing practice. These poems are reflections on my experience of matrescence and observations of the more-than-human world specially in the Sonoran Desert. Although I have been writing poetry since I was a little girl in my bedroom, this daily practice didn’t start until the day I birthed my first child.
Legacy Stitches are needlework pieces made in various forms of traditional techniques like knitting, sewing, crocheting, and latch hook which I learned from my grandmothers who learned from their mothers; as well as traditional Lakȟóta techniques such as beading and quilling. My needlework also includes quilting & embroidery which have been traditional forms in both family lineages and bookbinding.
revealing, mending, tending,
the unseen mycelium,
moving from maiden to mother,
always in a state of postpartum.
My creative practice was born out of a desire to connect with my ancestors & future kin. Once I transitioned into matrescence my work became a way to live and teach my children values of kinship and reciprocity. Through photography, poetry, and traditional needlework I reveal connections between Celtic and Lakȟóta cultures, mend familial & generational traumas, and tend to my learning about the more-than-human world through Indigenous ways of knowing.
Simultaneous Memories are multiple photographic exposures which use data, timing, and seasonal observations to mark rituals along the Celtic Wheel of the Year and the Lakȟóta Medicine Wheel, thereby creating and documenting a modern family culture of both traditions. I make base photographs during daily and seasonal rituals that involve foodways, movement, ceremony, space & place, land, and community.
Begging Poetics are poems made from a daily writing practice. These poems are reflections on my experience of matrescence and observations of the more-than-human world specially in the Sonoran Desert. Although I have been writing poetry since I was a little girl in my bedroom, this daily practice didn’t start until the day I birthed my first child.
Legacy Stitches are needlework pieces made in various forms of traditional techniques like knitting, sewing, crocheting, and latch hook which I learned from my grandmothers who learned from their mothers; as well as traditional Lakȟóta techniques such as beading and quilling. My needlework also includes quilting & embroidery which have been traditional forms in both family lineages and bookbinding.
