Rate My Professor Nish Belford

Dr. Nish Belford is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Curriculum Teaching and Inclusive Education in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. She teaches units in Visual Art and Design Education for secondary pre-service teachers and Creative Arts Education for primary pre-service teachers. Belford holds a Doctor of Philosophy from Deakin University and possesses extensive international experience in art education, curriculum development, and educational policy. As a practising artist, she integrates her roles as artist, researcher, and teacher through the a/r/t framework. Her academic career includes prior positions at Deakin University School of Education.

Belford's research specializations include culturally responsive pedagogies to foster inclusion and support cultural diversity in education. She examines issues of race, gender, colour, and class through a postcolonial feminist lens, focusing on postcoloniality, patriarchal legacies, diasporic heritages, migration transitions, and identity negotiation among transnational women of colour. Her interests extend to migration and transnational studies, particularly challenges faced by women of Indian origin in education, acculturation, and settlement. Belford is proficient in qualitative methodologies such as autoethnography, narrative research, and visual research methods, alongside creative art pedagogies and arts-based research promoting cross-cultural understanding and migrant community well-being. Key publications include co-editing Asian Women, Identity and Migration: Experiences of Transnational Womanhood (2020) with Reshmi Lahiri-Roy; editing The Layered Landscape of Higher Education: Capturing Curriculum, Diversity, and Cultures of Learning in Australia (2025); and co-authoring "Hope theory as resistance: narratives of South Asian scholars in Australian academia" (2025), "Culturally Responsive Teaching with pre-service teachers and the challenges to action" (2025), "(Re)negotiating transnational identities: notions of 'home' and distanced intimacies" (2019), and "Culture Shock, Social Interaction, and Friendship Development" (2017). She has received the ECR grant through the Dean’s ECR fund (2017) and Teacher Education, Language, Arts and Professional Learning funding (2018). Belford is an affiliate of the Monash Sustainable Development Institute.