Starting as an international outdoor adventure guide, Otis Kriegel made his way to the classroom afterwards and has been teaching and tutoring privately for the past 18 years. Having taught in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Berlin, Germany, Otis has taught all of the grades 1st -8th in monolingual, dual language (Spanish/English), and fully inclusive classroom setting as well as also created and taught a Digital Arts program for a public Middle School in New York City.

Otis Kriegel has expertise with numerous literacy and math programs and approaches such as Words Their Way, Teachers College Reading & Writing Project, Sounds in Motion, Fundations (an Orton-Gillingham based approach), TERC (Investigations), Engage (Zearn), Math City and Marilyn Burns methods of teaching math. He is also well versed in the FOSS and Amplify science curriculums and is very experienced in mixing and matching different curricula and approaches to match the student, group or class with whom he is working.

A product of a Montessori education himself, Otis Kriegel is familiar with these methods as well and utilizes them in his everyday teaching. Otis is also comfortable teaching remotely using many different programs such as Google Classroom, Zoom, Raz Kids, Zearn, Loom, Flipgrid and other platforms that make remote learning both effective, captivating and fun!

Otis Kriegel was an adjunct professor at New York University and a guest speaker at The Bank Street College of Education, City College of New York, Touro College and others. An experienced presenter, Oits has spoken at numerous conferences and given workshops to hundreds of new and veteran teachers alike, as well as consulted with educational administrators and principals. He wrote Everything a New Elementary School Teacher REALLY Needs to Know (But Didn’t Learn in College) (Free Spirit, 2013) and Starting School Right: How do I plan for a successful first week in my classroom? (ASCD Arias, 2016). Most recently, Otis has been giving virtual workshops to corporations and organizations such as The Gap, The Office of the Mayor of the City of New York, Hoot Suite, TMP and others on how families can balance working from home while educating their child during the pandemic.

Otis is also an artist, who cofounded the public art collective, Illegal Art, whose book, Suggestion (August 2005), was published by Chronicle Books. Their work has been featured by such media outlets as National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Public Art Review and The New York Times Op Art page. His work has been exhibited, commissioned and published in catalogs throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and The Middle East, and he was an artist-in-residence at the 2013 SXSW Festival.

Otis Kriegel was also commissioned by The White House to participate in the South By South Lawn Festival (Obama Administration). In 2018, Otis gave a TED Talk about this work.