Faculty Profile

LCDS faculty are always learning.

Art teacher and professional artist Susan Gottlieb traveled from the Abu Simbel Temple, near the border of Sudan, to the Valley of the Kings and the temples of Luxor, into the Sahara, Alexandria, and back to Cairo in her first-ever visit to Egypt. She gained a much-deeper understanding in the ancient art of the Egyptians and of hieroglyphics, which will inform her teaching at LCDS.

“I have finally come face-to-face with the longest continuous thread of ancient history in the world,” she wrote about her travels. “Not sure I have ever felt so saturated….but the density of history here is deep and thick. The complexity of Pharonic history [with] the Greco-Roman and Islamic…is almost a whisper when compared to the history of the desert.”

Gottlieb was amazed at the sheer size and diversity of the geological and historic realities that Egypt presents. Who would have guessed that the Sahara begins as a “black” desert, transforms into a crystal desert and then, as one travels south, a white desert, as wind-blown chalk deposits become mysterious geological forms?

She visited seven of the 109 pyramids: cemeteries of ancient kings on the west bank of the Nile River, while temples stand on the east side of the river. All of this informs Susan’s approach to teaching art history at LCDS. “When I teach my students or present assemblies for other classes, I am now filled with a knowledge and enthusiasm about these ancient art forms.”