Indigo Eriksen Named Interim Director of Faculty Professional Development

The Office of Academic Affairs is pleased to announce the appointment of English Professor and QEP co-coordinator Indigo Eriksen (WO) as the new interim director of faculty professional development. Her role will focus on creating engaging professional development opportunities for all NOVA faculty.

Prof. Eriksen is well known for her teaching excellence. She was a 2024 AACC Faculty Member of the Year Finalist; 2024 VCCS Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) nominee; and 2024 SCHEV Outstanding Faculty Nominee. Professor Eriksen received a 2024 DEI Innovation Grant to support The NOVA Outdoors Project, which teaches students how to backpack and hosts monthly hikes. She has experience developing innovative professional development—she and the rest of the Writing Ourselves In QEP team received the 2024 New Horizons Excellence in Education Award for Classroom Excellence. She serves on the Southern Regional Education Board’s Advisory Committee for the Center of Innovative Faculty Development. She is active in the field of writing and rhetoric and is a member of Two-Year College English Association’s Editorial Board. She is a 2024 Writing the Land poet with The Nature Conservancy’s  Piney Grove Preserve, a 2021 The Inner Loop writer-in-residence at the Woodlawn Pope-Leighey House, 2020 fiction winner of the Inner Loop-District Fray Writing Contest and recipient of the 2019 Mary Roberts Rinehart prize in nonfiction from GMU. Her work has appeared in The Northern Virginia Review, Scratching Against the Fabric, Endlessly Rocking, TYCA-SE Journal, District Fray and Texas Review. In 2019-2020, Indigo received the Chancellor’s Faculty Fellowship to support her doctoral study.

Raised in Colorado and Virginia, Professor Eriksen earned her BA in environmental studies from Lewis & Clark College before moving to Guatemala and Mexico. She received her MFA from Mills College and her MA in comparative literature from San Francisco State University. She is in the process of finishing her PhD in writing and rhetoric at GMU. She taught English on the Woodbridge Campus for ten years before stepping into this interim role.

Please join in welcoming Professor Indigo Eriksen as the lead for the faculty professional development program in Academic Affairs.

Submitted by:
Dr. Eun-Woo Chang, VPAA/CAO, EChang@nvcc.edu