Andrea Pearson, Ph.D., is the principal researcher and writer for The Scholar's Desk. Trained as an art historian, Andrea pursued her passion for interdisciplinary perspectives in scholarship in her doctoral dissertation on art and gender at the Cistercian convent of Flines in the sixteenth century (University of California, Santa Barbara, 1995).

Andrea carried these interests through to her published studies. Her book, Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350-1530: Experience, Authority, Resistance (Ashgate, 2005), which she wrote as an affiliate at the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland, was awarded Honorable Mention for Best First Book by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship in 2008. Subsequently she conceptualized and edited a volume of essays titled, Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Agency, Identity (Ashgate, 2008). Her essays on women, gender, and the arts have appeared in Gesta, Renaissance Quarterly, the Sixteenth Century Journal, and Woman's Art Journal. Her Gesta essay, on Mary Magdalene and the Burgundian Duchess Margaret of York, was named Article of the Month for January 2005 by Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index. Andrea has presented her research at over twenty national and international conferences and symposia, by both peer review and invitation, since 1987.

Prior to founding The Scholar's Desk, Andrea was a professor of art history at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania (1995-2008), where she was presented with the institution's annual award for distinguished teaching in 2001. At Bloomsburg she served on the University's Tenure Committee and as Chair of the Department of Art and Art History, Chair of the University Honors Program Advisory Board, and President of the University's faculty-student chapter of the National Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. Early in her career she taught at the Santa Barbara and Riverside campuses of the University of California and held the position of Registrar at the University Art Museum in Santa Barbara, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, and the Muscatine Art Center in Iowa. In addition to teaching courses in art history, at Bloomsburg she taught museum studies and curated over a dozen gallery exhibitions with her students. Andrea is currently on the adjunct faculty at American University in Washington, DC. She lectures periodically for The Smithsonian Associates.