Ms. Richards received her B.Ed from UBC in Vancouver, and her M.Ed (Curriculum & Instruction in Fine Arts) at SFU in Burnaby. She is a member of the Young Artists Committee (SD73), and a former president of the BC Art Teachers’ Association. She is also the webmaster for the Young Artists, the editor of Visually Speaking, and a regular contributor to this educator resource.

As president of the BCATA, she spent 5 years serving on the PSA Council of the BC Teachers’ Federation, and represented the art educators of BC at CSEA conferences in Labrador, Edmonton, Montreal, and Vancouver. In addition, she has served as the official delegate for BC at the NAEA conferences in Denver, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Baltimore, and participated in the Canadian Consultations to UNESCO in 2005.

Ms. Richards provides various workshops to her colleagues locally and provincially in a variety of media (acrylic, glass, copper, mixed media, clay…) and subjects, and often presents at the Young Artists Conference. She likes to work with a variety of media, focusing mainly on the element of colour in her work. Her work is regularly displayed at the BC Teachers’ Federation, and one of her glass pieces is part of the BCTF’s permanent collection. 

In October 2012, she was awarded a national teaching award from the Canadian Society for Education through Art for her contributions to art education in BC. The presentation took place at the national art education conference held in Fredericton, New Brunswick. In March of 2013, she received an international award at the NAEA conference in Fort Worth, Texas.

She was also one of the writers who created the new Arts Education K-9 curriculum, the Visual Arts courses for  Arts Education 10-12, and more recently the new Work Experience curriculum (WEX 11 and 12) for BC’s Ministry of Education.