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Story by RENEE UMSTED | Photography by YUVIE STYLES

LIPSCOMB ELEMENTARY TEACHER ZORAIDA BUSTOS SEES HER ROLE AS MORE THAN DISPENSING KNOWLEDGE.

To Bustos, who was recently named Lipscomb’s Teacher of the Year, it’s about relationships.

Though she had different jobs throughout her life, Bustos knew, even from a young age, that she’d end up as a teacher someday.

She moved with her family from Mexico to Brownsville, Texas, when she was 5 years old, and she grew up in South Texas.

Bustos studied psychology and sociology at the University of Brownsville, now called the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her first job out of college was with Child Protective Services, where she stayed for five years.

But then she had her first son, and she and her husband wanted to continue growing their family. So things changed.

“Working with CPS was a high-risk job,” she says. “You work 24 hours a day. You’re on call on the weekends. Sometimes you go out on calls at 2 in the morning, 3 in the morning. And so that was the point that we realized that I wanted a more stable job for myself and for my family.”

She had already completed an alternative teaching certification, just as her sister, an educator in Austin, did. Once she passed her assessments, she was ready to become a teacher.

An aunt of Bustos’ husband, who had been working at Oran Roberts Elementary School for over 15 years, encouraged her to work at Dallas ISD. In 2015, Bustos was hired as a second-grade dual-language teacher at Lipscomb Elementary.

When she was hired, she thought she’d never want to teach fifth grad - ers “because, you know, attitude,” Bustos says. But now, as a fourthand fifth-grade teacher, she doesn’t think she could go back to the younger kids.

The material she teaches her students is different from what she learned as an elementary-schooler, so Bustos prioritizes thoroughly understanding the subjects so she can make sure her students grasp the concepts.

Interactive activities are a strategy for student comprehension. One of her students’ favorites is what they call the “buzz game.” Bustos has buzzers like those used in TV game shows, and students use them during reviews to signal that they want to answer questions. She even created a store, where students can use points accumulated by answering questions correctly to buy prizes such as books and candy.

Bustos’ work stood out to her peers at Lipscomb, and they selected her to be Teacher of the Year.

“I honestly take that with immense gratitude and honestly makes me super humble because I’ve always compared myself to the best teachers out there, and I’m always trying to strive to be like them,” she says.

Eventually, Bustos says she would love to become an instructional coach for math. But she hasn’t let go of one of her earlier career goals, working as a school counselor.

Her husband encourages her to move into the administrative side of education, but Bustos says she prefers working with children, rather than adults.

“I was very blessed to have amazing teachers while I was in school,” Bustos says. “So I just wanted to be that for my kids — be a safe place, somebody they could always count on and come back to talk to.”

AMANDA DOTSETH IS THE FIRST TO SAY SHE HAS NO ARTISTIC TALENT. THAT HASN’T PREVENTED HER FROM TURNING ART INTO A LIFELONG OBSESSION AND CAREER — ONE THAT HAS LED HER TO MAKE LOCAL HISTORY AS THE FIRST FEMALE DIRECTOR OF SMU’S MEADOWS MUSEUM.

Seeing collections at the University of Arizona Museum of Art were enough to ignite Dotseth’s interest in art from a young age. Her AP Art History class took a trip to the museum, where she could see works by Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko along with Spanish art.

“As a high school student in Tucson, Arizona, I got to see old master paintings, and that’s pretty special,” Dotseth says.

In college at the University of Arizona, she knew she wanted to take art history classes, and to do that, she had to major in the field. Dotseth decided to take a yearlong study abroad program in Madrid, Spain, a country she first visited at age 12.

During her year abroad, Dotseth could study Picasso in front of one of his paintings and take classes at the Prado.

The University of Arizona’s art museum was the first Dotseth worked at. As a student, she was posted at the front desk, though she had opportunities to take on other responsibilities, such as helping with events and monitoring galleries. Eventually, she ended up as an assistant to the associate director, which allowed her to help with grant applications.

“Once they find out you’re halfway competent, you get kind of pulled into things and you know, it’s the good news about small museums,” Dotseth says.

After graduation, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to research architecture and architectural restoration in Spain.

“That was really, I would say, the kind of game changer that was like, ‘OK, this is definitely the career for me,’” Dotseth says. “It’s one thing to study in the classroom and be like, ‘Oh, pretty,’ or, ‘Oh, I got to go stand at the Prado and look at “Las Meninas.’” But if you still love it after you’ve spent three days in archives, I think you’re in good shape.”

Dotseth, who now lives in East Dallas, earned her master’s degree in art history from Southern Methodist University in 2006 and worked in a curatorial position for three years at the Meadows Museum. Later, she went to London, earning a Ph.D. in medieval Spanish art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2015.

While working toward her doctorate, Dotseth had a fellowship in Madrid at the Spanish National Research Council. She was part of a team researching women as makers of medieval art and architecture, highlighting women’s talents and contributions to the fields.

“The impression is that when you find a female artist in the Middle Ages that she’s an exception,” Dotseth says. “But in, I would say, most cases, we don’t actually know if it was a man or a woman. It’s anonymous. So the argument is, anonymous could be a woman and probably was in a lot of instances.”

She came back to Dallas as the Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Meadows Museum. Then she became a curator under Mark A. Roglán, who led the museum for 20 years before his death in 2021.

Earlier this year, Dotseth was named the new director of the museum.

Though the title is a milestone, Dotseth points to other accomplishments she has achieved leading up to the appointment.

For example, she played a key role in bringing an exhibition on Francisco Gallego to the museum in 2008. The project began around 2004, when Dotseth was still a student. Twenty-six panel paintings created in the late-medieval period were shipped from Arizona to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, where they underwent technical analysis, including infrared reflectography. The imaging allows researchers to see the underdrawings below the paint.

“These kinds of projects happen a lot, where the imaging happens but it’s not necessarily published,” Dotseth says. “And in this case, that was what was the big deal. There was a catalog with scholarly essays, and we published all of those infrared reflectograms.”

Plus, the images were displayed in the exhibition.

Dotseth is also proud of acquisitions the museum has made in recent years, pieces made by lesser-known artists important to Spanish art.

Now as director, Dotseth spends time speaking with art sellers, leading museum tours, teaching classes, completing administrative work, discussing potential collaborations with other museums and working on outreach strategies.

“I think it’s important to be the first female director of the Meadows Museum so that other women working at other art museums in other positions see someone like them in charge,” Dotseth says. “And something we’re all working on across the field is diversifying our employee base with men, women, people of color, all of that.”

IN 2020, NEIGHBORHOOD RESIDENT KATHRYN BAZAN LEARNED THE DALLAS CITY COUNCIL WOULD SOON VOTE ON A REQUEST TO BUILD A CONCRETE BATCH PLANT NEXT TO A NEIGHBORHOOD IN ZACHA JUNCTION, NEAR THE INTERSECTION OF GARLAND ROAD AND EAST NORTHWEST HIGHWAY.

She believed the project had to be stopped.

Bazan and her neighbors, who knew nothing of zoning procedures, formed a community action group and led a grassroots campaign. They held socially distanced meetings in backyards and passed out flyers. About 40 people signed up to speak in opposition at the council meeting, drawing from organized talking points, she says.

Their efforts, which began two weeks prior to the city council vote, proved successful. And it was just the beginning of Bazan’s activism.

“We decided, we’ve got this momentum,” Bazan says. “We know some things that we didn’t know before, and we can share this information with other communities that are going through the same things.”

She invited local officials and zoning staff, state representatives and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to discuss how concrete batch plants affect residential areas. Then she mapped all such plants that have ever been permitted in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, showing where the plants are concentrated.

After some press attention, Bazan started receiving inquiries from people throughout Texas, asking for advice to oppose plants from being approved in their neighborhoods.

Eventually, she learned about the city’s Comprehensive Environmental & Climate Action Plan, and she contacted her council representative, Paula Blackmon, to learn more. Blackmon appointed Bazan to represent District 9 on the newly formed Environmental Commission — becoming the first female chair of an organization Bazan says is meant to facilitate information and feedback between the city and its residents.

“To be a woman in a leadership role is not easy, but I am supported and empowered by a whole group of other women on the commission who help me get the hard things done,” Bazan says.

Her appointment and work on the commission is a lifetime in the making.

It’s not enough that she has spent her career working to preserve nature. She wants to address inequity, too.

“When we’re looking at policies, the structure of our government, the way that we have historically treated community members regarding their placement next to sources of pollution, those things are really what I am most interested in dismantling,” she says.

Bazan, a master naturalist, is originally from Fort Worth but spent most of her childhood surrounded by nature in the Piney Woods region of East Texas.

While she was taking college classes, she worked in municipal governments, including the City of Irving, where she helped launch its environmental sustainability office.

She left the city after four years to work for a renewable energy company. After a year, she started at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, where she worked in environmental assistance. Bazan kept that job for about four years, leaving when she was pregnant with her son; she didn’t want to be exposed to contaminants on site visits.

While she was at home, she started a consulting company that has evolved, and she now helps clients with graphic and web design and strategic communications. The steps to start the consulting venture — creating a website and logo, taking photos, marketing, accounting — gave her the skills she offers clients in a variety of industries through her business, Nested Creative.

“I was able to take on clients when I wanted to and not to take clients when I didn’t want to,” Bazan says. “And I have been able to have the flexibility to do the advocacy and the volunteer work that I’m really passionate about.”

The volunteer work has been manifested through Friends of the Old Fish Hatchery, which Bazan became involved with after Oncor clear-cut the area at White Rock Lake Park in 2020.

Chairing the Environmental Commission is volunteer work, too.

The commission has already helped change the zoning code so concrete batch plants can only be in industrial manufacturing districts, and the commission added two opportunities for public input on those cases. Bazan’s proud of that accomplishment.

Another thing she’s proud of is the commission’s contribution to the city’s racial equity plan; an environmental commission subcommittee wrote four equity indicators — land use, trees, access to solar technology and food security — to be incorporated into the plan.

“I really want to fundamentally change the game in Dallas,” Bazan says. “I want to change the way that we look at land use in our communities, who gets resources, who gets consideration, who gets the opportunity to live a quality life.”