Arts education IS Education. It connects subject matter, the past to the present, and allows children and adults to develop the creativity essential to solving the world’s problems. Most importantly, the arts and arts education connect people and develop empathy, a skill I hope to see grow in all our young people.
My own journey in the arts began when I was a child. I grew up as a performer, but I knew from a young age that it was not the entirety of my artistic life. After studying Musical Theatre and Opera at the prestigious Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, I decided to attend UC Berkeley to expand my horizons and focus on arts, anthropology, and social justice. My majors, Anthropology and Dance and Performance Studies, allowed me to see beyond my community and through art understand the world through a cultural lens, expanding my empathy and opening my eyes to my own privilege and the circumstances of people outside my previous understanding.
Over my years at UC Berkeley, professors saw an openness and enthusiasm for the transformative power of the arts and recommended I begin teaching in Berkeley schools. I fell in love with being a teaching artist. Visiting classrooms every week to teach dance and theatre became the highlight of my week, and I was inspired to earn my California Multiple Subject Teaching Credential and later earned a degree from Columbia in Music and Music Education.
While working towards my credential I began teaching full time in some of Northern California’s toughest classrooms. As a second grade teacher and later a music teacher, I confronted poverty, abuse, and a general mistrust for the school system. The arts were the center of my classroom teaching, and I believe my students greatly benefited from this choice, especially my students who had experienced a great deal of trauma in their lives. In 2006 my music/theatre program was cut due to No Child Left Behind requirements. I began working at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts where I learned the delicate art of not only teaching but mentoring teaching artists. I led workshops for classroom teachers and began to see the power a non profit could have on its community when artists, educators, and school administrators came together for the good of their students. I learned to write grants that were funded by the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. I also began the journey of understanding how to work with a non profit board and how to balance the needs of the organization, both mission and financial, and the needs of the larger community.
In addition, I have a great deal of experience creating and growing programs. Over my almost four years at Bay Area Children’s Theatre, I have grown our student matinee program from reaching 10,000 students a year to now reaching almost 30,000. I have also created BACT’s first ever theatre program for children with autism in addition to writing grants for our ongoing programs, overseeing logistics in my department and supervising my staff.
