FIS Upper School Visual Arts Department

Meet the FIS Upper School Visual Arts faculty members and learn a little about what they do both in the art studios and outside of school.

Darren Trebel

Darren Trebel joined the faculty at FIS in 1995 and has been Head of the Visual Arts Department since 1999. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University (NY) where he studied art history, painting and art conservation techniques, completing the last year of his undergraduate studies in Florence, Italy in 1985. He was awarded a Masters in Art History (Italian Renaissance Art and Contemporary Theory) from the University of Virginia in 1992 and has taught art and art history for sixteen years. Mr Trebel is a painter and has been fortunate to have had several recent solo exhibitions in the Frankfurt area. He also is an avid foil fencer and has been teaching beginning fencing at FIS for ten years, both as an elective and as an after-school activity. He lives in Oberursel with his wife, Masha (art teacher at International School Wiesbaden) and his daughter Hannah.

Mr Trebel teaches grade 8 art, grade 10 Foundations art and IB Diploma level classes as well as Theory of Knowledge. He is also a Visual Arts Examiner for the IBO. Mr Trebel can usually be found in room 352 on the Main Campus. Contact Mr Trebel here.

 

William Owen

William Owen joined the art department in 1997. He has a BA in Fine Arts (with Honours) and received his Art Teacher's Diploma with distinction. Although Mr Owen started his career in 'normal' schools, he enjoyed the multi-cultural experience of teaching Chinese students so much that he went on to teach in an Arab school and then in the Frankfurt International School. He has prepared students for O/A level, GCSE, and IB art examinations. His after school art clubs are popular and have increased from 1 to 3 sessions per week. Mr Owen is an exhibiting painter and has taken part in over 40 art exhibitions in several countries and his paintings are in private collections across the world.

Mr Owen teaches grade 6 art, grade 7 and grade 8 art classes. He can usually be found in room 347 on the Main Campus. Contact Mr Owen here.

Yvonne Murray

Yvonne Murray joined the faculty at ISW in 2003 and has been working at the Main FIS campus as an Upper School art teacher since 2004. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh, where she studied Printed Textile Design. She was awarded a Masters in Printed Textiles from the Manchester Metropolitan University in 1994, before going on to work as an artist in Residence in the Western Isles, Scotland. After working on several community arts projects for the Highland Festival she later completed a further Post Graduate Course in Teaching at Moray House, Edinburgh, and was awarded her PGCE in Art Education in 1997. She has taught art for five years. Ms Murray is actively involved in creating her own art work - working on mixed media collages and has an art studio in Mainz where she is currently working on a series of collages on the theme of birds.  
 
Ms Murray teaches grade 9 art, grade 10 Foundations art and IB Diploma level classes. She can usually be found in room 351 on the Main Campus. Contact Ms Murray here.

The art faculty at FIS take great pride in their work in the classroom and in the work that their students produce. They also take very seriously their obligations as heirs of a long and colorful tradition of excellence in art education in one of Europe's oldest and largest International Schools.

In addition to their regular classroom duties, the art teachers in the Upper School feel strongly about the need for art teachers to be practicing artists themselves, making art as they teach art; leading by example and (whenever possible) doing so in the presence of their students.

Finally, the art teachers in the Upper School take their professional development very seriously, attending regular annual conferences of many of Europe's leading educational associations (such as IB, CIS and AGIS) and taking a leading role in the school's current efforts to develop curriculum documentation. Darren Trebel, in addition to his IBO examining duties. is a former Art Committee Chair and experienced Visiting Team Accreditor for the Council of International Schools, while Bill Owen is a regular presenter at the annual Association of German International Schools conferences. Yvonne Murray regularly attends IB Diploma conferences and takes time to develop her contacts with German art associations and local artists. She is also unique in setting goals for herself: she has thus far kept to her vow to familiarize herself with a new artistic medium (through formal classwork or training) every year.