For Theresa Giorza, education has always been inseparable from creativity, community, and social purpose.
She began her career in 1983 as an art teacher in Harare, Zimbabwe, before transitioning to the country’s department of education, where she worked in audio-visual learning services.

Read more: The art of learning with Theresa Giorza

These early experiences shaped her understanding of how children learn – and how art can deepen that learning across contexts. In the early 1990s, Giorza joined Sacred Heart College, helping build a dynamic arts department that integrated drama, music, and visual arts into the school’s ethos. Alongside classroom teaching, she became involved in educational publishing and later contributed to the Curriculum Development Project, where she helped train community arts facilitators and co-authored Creative Beginnings, a foundational handbook for arts-based work with children.

Her deepening interest in the early years led her to pursue a Master’s and PhD in Education at Wits University. Her doctoral research focused on early childhood learning within a Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool, where she spent months documenting children’s inquiries and the collaborative processes that shape meaningful learning. This experience solidified her commitment to child-led, inquiry-driven education.

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Giorza later worked in teacher education in Cape Town before returning to Johannesburg, where she is now principal at Mimosa School, a Reggio-inspired preschool. Her work today focuses on collaborative leadership, teacher development, and shaping South African interpretations of the Reggio Emilia philosophy.

Across every chapter of her career, Giorza has championed environments where children are respected as thinkers, creators, and contributors, offering a powerful vision of what early education can be.

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