Areas of Expertise

  • Looking at arts in community and cultural contexts, particularly through integrating folk and traditional arts in meaningful ways
  • Connecting to young people’s own cultures, traditions, experiences, neighborhoods and bridging the gap between their school and home lives
  • Including and honoring stories and perspectives that are often left out, particularly through interviewing of community members and guest artists

Current Top Priorities for Guidance or Collaboration

Contact us to learn more about these current priority areas or to explore collaboration opportunities.
  • How to integrate folk and traditional arts and arts practitioners into the classroom or other educational setting in meaningful ways
  • How to design customized and collaborative art residencies with teaching artists and school communities
  • How to craft experiential, skills-based learning through an art form with a practicing artist
  • How to engage young people in investigating their neighborhoods, families, cultural traditions, and histories and utilize this firsthand research in their art-making
  • Creating professional development programs and workshops for educators, including classroom teachers, on how to bring a cultural and decolonial lens to arts education by centering culturally-rooted arts and marginalized perspectives
  • Strategies for educators on how to draw on the rich cultural traditions and resources of their city's/community's neighborhoods, and ethnic, linguistic, and artistic communities to support learning in the arts

Geographical Areas Served:

National, New England, Rural/Remote, Suburban/Exurban, Urban,

Primary Audience Served:

Children/Youth, Community Members, Parents, School-based Teachers, Teaching Artists,

Artistic Discipline:

Dance, Folk - Traditional & Indigenous Arts, Literature and Storytelling, Media Arts, Multidisciplinary Arts, Music, Theatre, Visual Arts,

Title: 2280 Pasos Bajo un Cielo Nublado | Artist: Hernán Jourdan | Medium: Film

When I was asked to create a work of art exploring literacy, I wanted to create a dance but I had no dancers or a studio, so I chose to use my own body in the space I had, my yard. Fluent Nature is video of micro-choreography that explores what cannot be expressed with words, how nature has its own language, and how placing the human body in nature changes the story.

Title: What Is Me and What Is Not Me | Artist: Alex Chadwell | Medium: Music

My thinking on arts and literacy centers around the concept of literacies and artmaking as both sense-making and meaning-making processes that organically and inevitably overlap, intersect, and reciprocate. Compositionally, What is me and what is not me is a sound collage of sorts (there is no notation for the piece, and I'd be hard pressed to recreate it accurately) that abstractly and aurally represents the relationships between literacies and artmaking.

Title: A Curious Honeybee | Artist: Gideon Young | Medium: Film

Offering welcome through traditional and digital elements of literacy, A Curious Honeybee provides an experiential learning environment by activating visual, musical, natural, and emotional literacies.

Title: Tercera Llamada | Artist: Karilú Forshee | Medium: Audio

La Carpa Theatre is a project that I am currently directing in the Detroit Latinx community. The project aims to strengthen and uplift youth voices through devised theatre, in the style of the Mexican Carpas. This audio was created in the theatrical environment envisioned for our project. The ways in which literacies are re-defined are at the heart of La Carpa Theatre's mission.

Title: Literaseas | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite and ink on paper with digital edits

Title: A Riddle | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite on paper with digital edits

Title: False Binaries | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite on paper with digital edits