Creative Minds Out Loud

Episode 115: Decreasing Stigma Around Addiction and Recovery

Improbable Players uses theater performances and workshops to address addiction, alcoholism, and the opioid epidemic. The troupe is comprised of actors who are themselves in recovery from substance addiction. Their former Executive Director Andy Short shares what it means to do destigmatizing and prevention work in schools.

“Theater people, we love to believe that the theater changes the world. And oh, it does,” he says.

Andy Short grew up just outside Boston and sadly did not inherit the wicked Boston accents of his parents. He graduated with a degree in Theatre Education from Emerson College. He has spent his career working at the intersection of education, theatre, and addiction. Was the Executive Director of Improbable Players -a theatre company that hires actors in recovery to perform plays about addiction in schools.

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Episode 114: Reflecting the Community in Art Spaces

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In late 2019, we spoke to Doneeca Thurston, the newly-named Director of Lynn Museum/Lynn Arts. The 29-year-old Lynn native said her new role felt like a homecoming. She shares her vision for how the museum can be a champion for its majority minority community and ensure that local artists feel respected and celebrated.

Doneeca Thurston (Image by Christopher Padgett / Citizen Salem) Doneeca Thurston is currently the Director of Lynn Museum/LynnArts, located in the heart of the Downtown Lynn Cultural District. A Lynn-native, a lot of her efforts are focused on community-centered initiatives, committed to making Lynn Museum/LynnArts’ spaces more inclusive, accessible, and visible to all.

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Episode 113: Unpacking Bias and Privilege in Cultural Organizations

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Sandra Bonnici is a Senior Diversity Fellow for the American Alliance of Museums and a diversity and inclusion consultant. She says that doing the work to make a cultural organization diverse and inclusive requires deep and constant reflection. Institutions need to challenge their processes by asking, “For whom does this work? For whom does this harm? For whom do we exist?”

Sandra Bonnici is a Facing Change Senior Diversity Fellow for the American Alliance of Museums. She is a collaborative leader, consultant, and presenter in the Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion (DEAI) space with strong competencies in organizational change, facilitation, assessment, training, and project management.

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Episode 112: Don’t Just Measure Numbers, You’ll Lose the Real Story

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Sue Dahling Sullivan is an independent consultant with more than 30 years of nonprofit management experience. We spoke to her about strategic planning when she was the Boch/Wang Center’s Chief Strategic Officer and ArtWeek Lead Champion. She believes that you have to be flexible in strategic planning because things do change. It’s an art and a science. She discusses her experience at nonprofits using The Balanced Scorecard, a framework that has been a cornerstone of Fortune 500 Company business planning for decades.

Sue Dahling Sullivan is an independent consultant and project manager who has over 30 years of diverse management experience with a focus on nonprofits and related sectors. Most recently she worked for over 15 years at the Boch/Wang Center as the Chief Strategic Officer, Chief of Staff, and ArtWeek Lead Champion, a strategic community initiative that grew into one of the state’s major cultural tourism events celebrating creativity and access for all in over 170 communities.

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Episode 111: Mindfulness as an Action

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Dell Marie Hamilton is an artist, writer, and curator. Her work uses the body to investigate questions about personal memory, citizenship, history, and gender. Last fall, she shared what it’s like to have a creative practice in an era of toxicity, and emphasized the importance of self-care and continually learning from other artists.

Dell Marie Hamilton. Photo: Terrence Jennings/terrencejennings.com Dell Marie Hamilton is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and independent curator whose artist talks, performances and collaborative projects have been presented to a wide variety of audiences in New York at Five Myles Gallery, Panoply Performance Lab, and MOCADA, as well as in the New England area at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, MIT, Boston University, the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston, the ICA/Boston, and the Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum.

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