Joan Weber
Joan Weber believes that place shapes everything — that the Brontës wrote the way they did because the Yorkshire moors are an insistent character in those novels, that Van Gogh’s palette changed because the Provençal light is genuinely different, that standing in the right location changes how you understand the work. This conviction is the foundation of Nerds Tour, the literary and cultural travel company she founded to bring that experience to curious travelers — and of Creative Geography: A Lecture Series, through which she brings the same argument into the room.
Joan holds a Master of Arts from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English and a B.A. in Literature and History from McDaniel College. She has published in the Teaching Artist Journal and written for Edutopia and Americans for the Arts.
Her teaching career spans more than two decades and every level of education. She taught literature, AP Art History, AP Literature, IB Theatre, and humanities at Glenelg Country School and St. Timothy’s School; served as Associate Graduate Faculty at Towson University for sixteen years; and taught at the University of Baltimore. She served as Head of Education at the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival and as first Executive Director of Arts Every Day, a Ford Foundation-funded arts education nonprofit.
Joan has also worked as an actress for more than twenty-five years on multiple stages, including a one-woman show touring Maryland as Susanna Shakespeare, William’s own daughter. She brings the same instinct for performance into every room she teaches in.
