Arts Educator / Artist Campaign School Cohort

Annalisa Dias is a Goan-American transdisciplinary artist, community organizer, and award-winning theatre maker working at the intersection of racial justice and care for the earth. She is Director of Artistic Partnerships & Innovation at Baltimore Center Stage. Annalisa is also a Co-Founder of Groundwater Arts. Prior to joining BCS, Annalisa was a Producing Playwright and Acting Creative Producer with The Welders, a DC playwright’s collective; and a Co-Founder of the DC Coalition for Theatre & Social Justice. Artistic credits include: WRITING: 4380 Nights, the earth that is sufficient, One Word More, The Last Allegiance, A Legacy of Chains, Crooked Figure, Consider the Dust, Matanuska, Coal, and Servant of the Wind. DEVISING: Wit’s End Puppets: Malevolent Creatures; banished? productions: Tyger; Theater Alliance: I Love DC. DIRECTING: Source Festival: Dust to dust to dust and Dressing Bobby Strong; The Salima Project (film). Annalisa’s work has been produced or developed by The Welders, Theater Alliance, Signature Theatre (DC), Arena Stage, the Phillips Collection, The Gulfshore Playhouse, the Mead Theatre Lab, The Hub Theatre, Spooky Action Theater, Tron Theatre (Glasgow), and OverHere Theatre (London). Annalisa frequently teaches theatre of the oppressed and decolonization workshops nationally and internationally and speaks about race, identity, and performance. She is a TCG Rising Leader of Color. Recent work includes THE EARTH, THAT IS SUFFICIENT, a performance project about hope for the future in the face of the climate catastrophe, produced by The Welders throughout 2019 in Washington DC and globally.

Caitlin Curtis is a multidisciplinary artist and an art educator at the Baltimore Lab School in Baltimore, Maryland where she teaches art to students 1-12 and where she is the facilitator of the Equity & Understanding Committee. Curtis has an MFA in Photography and Electronic Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Curtis grew up in Southern Maryland and attended Towson University for a BFA in Photography and her BS in Art Education. Curtis began her artistic career as a photographer and video artist. Her subject matter reflected her interests in feminism, gender roles, identity, and performance. Her early work MyFemaleIdentitiy and Concatenation reiterates the ideas generated by first and second-wave feminist artists and scholars such as, gender norms, body objectification, and gender inequality that continue to dominant contemporary culture. As her work evolved, Curtis began to create in response to current political issues related to trauma, sexual assault, and equity. Curtis continues to teach and create work that challenges traditional modes of thinking.

Christina Delgado is the founder & owner of Tola’s Room, a collective of the arts, community, and education. She is deeply invested in issues of diversity, equity, and art empowerment, upholding the mindset that these issues are a collective responsibility and thus require engagement and action. In addition to Tola’s Room, Christina currently serves as the Stewardship Coordinator for North East Housing Initiative (NEHI) a community land trust nonprofit in North East Baltimore. She served for 5 years as the Community Development Manager at Belair-Edison Neighborhoods, Inc. where she envisioned, created, facilitated, and managed multiple creative community art related projects—helping to revitalize Belair-Edison, a community in Northeast Baltimore and her home of 15 years. At the city level, she serves in the Community Advocacy Position on the Board of the Environmental Control Board for Baltimore City and the Director of Community Relations on the Board of City Neighbors Hamilton, along with serving on various community-based grant review committees and race equity groups. She remains active on the Maryland State Arts Council’s Artist-in-Resident Roster and works part time as a Photography Teaching Artist and Community Arts Education Consultant with Young Audiences of Maryland.

Mr. Dennis Lee has devoted more than 20 years to music education and performance. He has taught all band levels from elementary school to college, including two years instructing the U.S. Coast Guard Recruit Field and Ceremonial bands. As a former Assistant Band Director of Baltimore City College High School, he built the marching band from twenty-five to one hundred students.

He has served as an Percussion Instructor for Howard University “Showtime Marching Band” and Assistant Band Director of Cheney State University, where he taught music theory and led the percussion ensemble. Mr. Dennis Lee also established and led Coppin State University’s student-led pep band from 2014 – 2015.

EDUCATION

Mr. Dennis Lee is currently completing his Bachelor of Arts in Early Childhood Education at the University of Arizona. He studied at Berklee College of Music, which included extensive music business and instrumental music studies.

HISTORY

Mr. Dennis Lee was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from Paul Laurance Dunbar High School under the tutelage of Mr. Charles Funn. Mr. Lee played trumpet in the jazz, concert, and marching bands. His passion for music began at the age of five when he began his first music lessons in drums. Mr. Lee started performing with his trumpet and drums for churches and community organizations throughout the east coast. At the age of 16, he left Baltimore to participate in Drum and Bugle Corps located in Bergen County, New Jersey. Following high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard, serving in the U.S. Coast Guard Recruit Band.

Currently, Mr. Dennis Lee is working on forming a Baltimore Youth Mass Band, organizing a march-a-thon for non-violence, and creating the Southwest Baltimore Drug-Free Coalition. Mr. Dennis Lee is the Founder of the Marching Elite Foundation, a member of the Drug-Free Baltimore Coalition, and a board member for the Maryland Citizens’ Review Board for Children.

Kayla Morgan was born in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2017 she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in general fine arts from The Maryland Institute College of Art, graduating Magna Cum Laude. Morgan has already been included in various exhibitions including a group exhibition at The World Trade Center in Baltimore and at the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park. Morgan was a 2019 cohort member of the Urban Arts Leadership Fellowship, receiving a citation from the Mayor of Baltimore for her work in her local community. Most recently, she was honored with a citation from the Secretary of Commerce for her dedication and contributions while working at the Maryland State Arts Council. Morgan currently works as the Marketing Manager at Baltimore Center Stage.

Megan Yingst is the current Choral Director & Guitar Teacher at Chesapeake High School STEM academy in Essex, Maryland. Previously, Megan taught chorus and keyboarding at Mulberry Middle School in Mulberry, Florida where her choirs received superior ratings and performed at Disney. During her time in Polk County, Megan served as the Children’s Choir Coordinator at First Presbyterian Church of Lakeland, the District 12 Coordinator-Elect for the Florida Vocal Association, and Coordinator of Polk All County Chorus. Megan has a lifelong passion for music education advocacy and has represented the Florida Music Education Association (FMEA) from 2016-2018 at the National Association for Music Education’s annual Collegiate Advocacy Day Summit. Megan holds her bachelors degree in Music Education from Florida Southern College.

Michele Minnick (PhD, CMA) is an independent artist, educator, and organizer working at the intersections of the performing arts, somatic practice, climate change, social justice, and healing. She creates performances that examine personal and communal narratives, beliefs and behaviors that stand between us and our wholeness. Since moving to Baltimore, she has performed and directed as a member of Iron Crow Theatre Company (2010-2013), and has been with the immersive performance company Submersive Productions since their inception in 2014. She has taught extensively in the MFA and BFA programs at Towson University (2008-2013), directed Kid-Simple at UMBC (2013), and is a teaching artist with Young Audiences of Maryland (SALA 2018,’19, & ’21), where her theatre programming focuses on social and emotional learning, social justice, and environmental awareness. In 2017, she co-produced a “Not My President’s Day” event, bringing together a diverse group of artists and art forms for a full day of kid-friendly and adult programming expressing collective rejection of Donald Trump’s election and policies. She won a Ruby Individual Artist Grant from the Deutsch Foundation for the development of her Baltimore-based project, House Calls, in which her performance persona, Dr. M., conducts performative, multi-sensory interviews in people’s homes, in order to animate relationships to the more-than-human world, and map stories of climate change. Michele is a specialist in The Performance Workshop and Rasaboxes, which she has been teaching and developing internationally for the past 23 years, and is co-author and editor of the upcoming book, The Rasaboxes Sourcebook: Inside Richard Schechner’s Performance Workshop (Routledge, 2022). In New York City, Michele was a member of Schechner’s theatre company, East Coast Artists (1994-2005). She taught The Performance Workshop at NYU from 1999-2016, and Rasaboxes workshops internationally. She was trained, and then taught in the Certification Program at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. She has also taught, directed and performed extensively in Brazil. Her solo work ReDress, a street performance/healing ritual addressing verbal abuse of women in public places, was featured in Magdalena Festivals in Florianopolis, Brazil and Quito, Ecuador, and produced independently in Montevideo, Uruguay and Natal, Brazil. Her 2016 dissertation (NYU Department of Performance Studies), Breathing Worlds: Somatic Practice, Performance, and the Self in the Life/Art Work of Leeny Sack, is an investigation of the relationship between historical and personal trauma, somatic practice, and the creative process. Michele is dedicated to a trauma-informed, somatic approach to anti-racism, and has been facilitating independent white-bodied affinity groups focused on developing an embodied understanding and transformation of White Body Supremacy, working with Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands, and other resources. She is currently training to be a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist, and is developing the interdisciplinary project, Vital Matters:Baltimore with Submersive Productions (first workshopped at Kennesaw State University, GA, during a visiting professorship 2019-20). Michele lives in Mt. Washington, where in 2020 she co-organized two outdoor neighborhood arts-based events. Learn more about these and other projects here: https://bakerartist.org/portfolios/michele-minnick-1

Nicole Fall is a community artist, educator, and sculptor. She was born and raised in Washington DC in the turbulent political era of the 1960s and 70s. She was influenced by her parents work. Her father, Bernard Fall, having survived WWII as a Jewish French Resistance fighter, was a professor at Howard University and wrote about the Vietnam War embedded with troops on the front lines. Her mother is an artist and graphic designer who worked for the federal government designing the magazine, Amerika, that was sent to the, then, Soviet Union and Poland. Nicole acknowledges her privilege.

She holds BFA (MICA) and MFA (Towson University) degrees. Her passion is the interaction with students; guiding them in making their own discoveries about their work, themselves and who they can become. Nicole is adamant about equal opportunity and access to a good education. In 2018 she co-established for Baltimore Clayworks, the ClayWorkforce Development Program in partnership with Baltimore City Public Schools’ Transition Connection Program.

Nicole has taught in a diverse array of settings including: as a founding teacher of Baltimore County Public Schools’ George Washington Carver Center for Arts and Technology, Baltimore City Schools, as an Associate Professor for Baltimore City Community College, as well as teaching for MICA. She has conducted workshops at Kyambogo University, Kampala, Uganda and Baltimore Clayworks among other teaching and lecturing.

She has worked as an arts administrator for Baltimore Clayworks. She is an exhibiting artist. She is currently working on community-based, public art projects with the Brooklyn O’Malley Boys and Girls Club. She is a recipient of Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards ( 1992, 2017).

Verónica is a puertorriqueña arts administrator and educator, currently serving as a Youth Programs Coordinator with the City of Hyattsville, Maryland. In this role, she creates multilingual and interdisciplinary programming for youth ages 1-18 and their families. She specializes in arts-integrated informal education because she believes in the power of the arts to facilitate learning, make sense of and express oneself, and unite with others around you. Her personal and professional experiences are centered on Latinx, women, youth, and Spanish-speaking communities. However, on any given day, she interacts with people of varied ages, countries of origin, gender expressions, languages, physical abilities, races and ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds. Therefore, through her work in publicly-funded programs in museums, schools, and community centers, she aims to design and execute high-quality initiatives that speak directly to the diversity of the communities she works with. She is an alumna of the Smithsonian Institution Latino Museum Studies Program, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership Institute, and holds a BA from Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and an MFA from The University of Texas at Austin.

Virginia Crawford is a long-time teaching artist with the Maryland State Arts Council. In April 2021, Apprentice House Press published her full-length collection of poetry, questions for water. One reviewer said, “her work mines the seam between the personal and the political. Crawford brings her lyrical voice and intimate perspective to the challenges faced by twenty-first century families, America, and the world.” Previously her chapbook Touch was published by Finishing Line Press. She has co-edited two anthologies: Poetry Baltimore, poems about a city, and Voices Fly, An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Program. She has appeared at the CityLit Fest, the Baltimore Book Festival, The Gaithersburg Book Festival and others. She earned degrees in Creative Writing from Emerson College, Boston, and The University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She lives and writes in Baltimore, Maryland. You can find out more at www.virginiacrawford.com.