While it is still disputed in some academic traditions, the potentials of artistic practice as research and arts-based research have demonstrated that creative engagement with materials, processes and ideas lead to holistic insights that move well beyond the goals of objective research and its quest for solid answers. The article retraces our experience as Art Education instructors guiding graduate students through an online capstone arts-based research course, as we endeavored to bring our students' artists', researchers' and in-service K-12 art teachers' identities into a productive place of "knowing-in-being," an embodied and relational model of inquiry. Emphasizing students' voices and their thinking throughout their a/r/tographic and phenomenological projects, we reexamine their artistic experiences and scholarly reflections as the course unfolded, arguing that our students' identity as teaching artists transformed in the process of making and thinking in, with, and through arts-based inquiry. The discussion of the paper is a narrative about pedagogical strategies and curricular decisions that were adopted as we designed, taught, and reflected upon the outcomes of the course. The article emphasizes how the processes of layering, unknowing and unlocking constituted experiential thresholds through which students discovered new creative capacities as artists, scholars and art teachers.