Universal Participation – 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 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 94: Look at Art. Get Paid.

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Through “Look at Art. Get Paid,” artists Maia Chao and Josephine Devanbu pay people who have never been to an art museum to visit one as guest critics. Having both studied social science in addition to art, Chao and Devanbu crave a candid conversation about the structural inequalities of art, critique, and its institutions.

Maia Chao and Josephine Devanbu Maia Chao is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores play and absurdity as subversive and emancipatory tools for collaboration and collective imagining. Chao holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from RISD. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant (2014), Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2017), and Van Lier Fellowship (2018), and is currently artist in residence at Pioneer Works (2019). She is based in Brooklyn, NY.

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Episode 83: Engaging Diverse Artists

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Rosemary Tracy Woods, Executive Director of Art for the Soul Gallery in Springfield, MA, discusses how artists can plug into their local arts community and how a community’s efforts to engage local artists can be more inclusive, and ultimately more representative of all the people they serve.

Rosemary Tracy Woods, Executive Director of Art for the Soul Gallery, strives to embody the intersection of art and social justice. Growing up the only girl in a Philadelphia family with eight brothers, one of whom was the late R&B singer, Harold Melvin of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Woods was immersed in art from a young age. Continue reading “Episode 83: Engaging Diverse Artists”

Episode 73: Hands-on Learning, Creating for Kids and Caregivers

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Discovery Museum is a hands-on museum that blends science, nature, and play, inspiring families to explore and learn together. Neil Gordon, CEO, discusses how universal design and User/Experts informed their recent expansion to a 16,000sf accessible building. He also shares their efforts to integrate parents into the exhibit experience. He says that in the museum’s new exhibits for children ages 0-3, the parental education that’s incorporated is as important as the child’s play.

Neil Gordon. Photo by Mitchell Green. In his nearly ten years as CEO, Neil Gordon has steered the Discovery Museum through a period of tremendous growth and change. Prior to joining the museum in 2009, Gordon served for 14 years as the Executive VP and COO for the Boston Children’s Museum. He is also past chairman of the board of the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM), a past board member of the New England Museum Association (NEMA), and a board member of the Massachusetts Institute for the Teaching of Science (MITS).
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