Philip Yenawine is cofounder of Visual Understanding in Education (VUE), a nonprofit educational research organization that develops and studies ways of teaching visual literacy and of using art to teach thinking and communication skills. VUE's curriculum, Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), is in use in schools across the United States and abroad. Director of Education at the Museum of Modern Art from 1983 to 1993, Yenawine also directed education programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art earlier in his career. He was founding director of the Aspen Art Museum and consulting curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. He has taught art education at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and Massachusetts College of Art. He received the National Art Education Associations Award for Distinguished Service in 1993, was the George A. Miller Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois in 1996, and was the first Educator-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2012, among other honors. He is on the board of the Art Matters foundation. Yenawine is the author of How to Look at Modern Art, Key Art Terms for Beginners, and six children's books about art. He helps with image selection as well as acts as a moderator for the NYTimes.com Learning Network feature, "What's Going On in This Picture?"

Yenawine attended Princeton University from 1960 to 1963, and holds a BA from Governor's State University in Park Forest South, Illinois, and an MA from Goddard College in Plainfi eld, Vermont. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Kansas City Art Institute in 2003.