Joy Gritton is a Kentucky native who seeks through her community service, teaching, and research to empower and inspire others to contribute their time, energies, talents, and intellect to collaborative community building. Gritton teaches Western and non-Western art history at Morehead State University and coordinates MSU's interdisciplinary Appalachian Studies minor program.

A native of Henderson, Kentucky, she attended Murray State University and the University of Heidelberg in Germany before receiving her Bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of Kentucky.  Specializing in Native American art, she received her Masters degree from the University of New Mexico and  Ph.D. at UCLA.  Gritton taught for seven years at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the only art school in the world that focuses exclusively on Native American art and artists.  Her first book, The Institute of American Indian Arts:  Modernism and U. S. Indian Policy, examines the early history of the school. 

Gritton has worked to encourage the practice of service learning and participatory research in higher education, fostering MSU's on-going collaboration with the Haldeman Community Center in Rowan County. For the past four years she has co-co-coordinated the center's after school program, which offers enrichment activities, tutoring, and nutritious snacks to children free of charge. In addition to staffing the Haldeman program, her students have worked on service learning assignments ranging from large scale murals to oral history projects, and have presented their community-focused research and projects at the Appalachian Studies Association annual conference for over a decade. Gritton is founder and coordinator of the Eastern Kentucky Arts Project, which promotes greater awareness of arts resources in Eastern Kentucky and is the Program Chair for the 2018 Appalachian Studies Association's conference in Cincinnati.

Her research addresses the relationship between the arts and social welfare, sustainable and culturally sensitive economic development, and healthy cross-cultural relations in a pluralistic society. Her forthcoming book, "Allen Eaton: American Art and Progressive Reform," is a synthesis of those interests.