2016-2017 Artists-in-Residence

Michelle Favin and Alysha English

Michelle Favin and Alysha English are exploring ways to empower the next generation of makers by developing the programmatic aspect of their emerging organization, HerCreative, an online and in-person community that connects young women of color who identify as creative entrepreneurs and makers with mentorship, personal development and leadership programming, and funds to launch their ideas and projects.

Using ideas from Project Zero’s Agency by Design (AbD) framework, Alysha and Michelle will facilitate a series of group and individual workshops in which participants, (young women between 18-24), will craft a personal narrative and call to action with the aim of outlining a plan for a project or business that will effect change in their world.  Incorporating an array of artistic mediums (visual art, creative writing, and performance) participants will engage in the AbD maker capacities of looking closely, exploring complexity, and finding opportunity, all in the pursuit strengthening their understanding of themselves and their capacity to effect change. The project will culminate in an exhibition in early May. 

Michelle and Alysha believe that if young women of color become more sensitive and critical of the systems they are a part of, they will strengthen their agency and understand their role in shifting and changing these systems. They become architects, rather than consumers of their world.

Michelle Favin is an artist, designer, and educator, most recently from Los Angeles. She received her MA in Sociology and Public Policy from New York University and is now a Master’s student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, studying the relationship between creative expression, confidence, and community-building. For the past seven years, Michelle has combined her belief in the arts with her knowledge of education to teach, create curriculum, and design learning experiences. Michelle believes in the ability of creative expression to guide people to unearth their unique voices and engender positive social change in the world around them and brings this passion to her work as co-founder of herCreative. Michelle loves all bodies of water, avocados, and discovering cities by foot. 

Alysha English is a performer, writer, educator, and arts administrator from the San Francisco Bay Area.  Alysha believes in building community through the process of making.   She has taught theatre, playwriting, and public speaking for ten years throughout the country in Washington, DC, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area.  She received her BFA in Theatre Arts from Howard University and is currently a Master's student at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is co-founder of herCreative and is looking forward to developing programs supporting creative entrepreneurs and young women of color during her time as a Project Zero Artist in Residence.  Alysha is a lover of avocado, the ocean, her puppy Arthur, and loose leaf tea. 

Trina Langsenkamp

Through image collection, journaling, and reflective discussion, Trina Langsenkamp is leading a group of students in joining the practices of mindfulness and abstract painting to explore their pasts, presents, and imaginable futures. She will employ ideas from PZ’s Out of Eden Learn (OOEL) project and her own artistic practice to support participants in slowing down and looking closely at their daily environments in relation to their lived, personal experiences and historical/ancestral backgrounds. Her project will culminate in an installation of participants’ paintings at Project Zero, accompanied by documentation of their learning and classroom lesson plans for future use. You can follow the evolution of Trina’s project on her blog here.

Trina Langsenkamp is an artist and educator from Rochester, New York. For the past two years, she worked as an education assistant at the Urban Arts Space in Columbus, Ohio where she developed and taught classes for students of all ages and abilities. She holds a Bachelor's in Art Education from The Ohio State University, and has previously taught in both elementary and high school art classrooms. 

 

Sneha Shresthais

Sneha Shresthais exploring the aesthetics of the English and Nepali alphabets and the principles of graffiti art with second grade students from the BostonPublic School system and school children from her hometown of Kathmandu, Nepal. Drawing from frameworks created by PZ’s Out of Eden Learn (OOEL) project, Sneha will encourage  the children to slow down and look closely at the at the mundane world around them, in this case the alphabets they use every day. Key moments of their processes will be documented along the way using ideas from PZ’s Making Learning Visible (MLV) project. Sneha’s project will culminate in a “graffiti wall” of the children’s names to be installed at their schools and in the PZ offices.

 

Sneha Shrestha is an artist and educator from Kathmandu, Nepal. She established Nepal’s first Children’s Art Museum to provide a creative space where children and youth can develop 21st century skills through hands-on art experiences. Sneha is currently a Master’s student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she is exploring international education systems and non-profit organizations and social entrepreneurship.

 

Sneha is also known as IMAGINE in the art world and has established herself as Nepali street artist meshing the Nepali alphabet and the Boston graffiti scene. She has shown her work in several exhibitions, commissioned works and public walls around the world including Boston, San Francisco, Bali, India and Istanbul. She has worked on projects for as Google Cultural Institute, Trip Advisor, Red Bull and Neiman Marcus. When not painting intricate pieces, Sneha paints bold larger than life walls and gets her community’s youth involved in them.

2015-2016 Artists-in-Residence

Andrea Alejandra Gordillo Marquina

Peter Woods

Peter Woods will facilitate a production workshop with local high school students to support their creation of non-narrative theatre and performance art pieces by utilizing a compositional process inspired by the research behind the Agency by Design project. Students will identify sources of artistic and thematic inspiration and explore these individually and as an ensemble, through thinking routines and frameworks developed by AbD and Visible Thinking. Peter will also create his own performance piece alongside his students and then combine all of the pieces into a larger show, tentatively titled The Agency Performances, to be presented to the public on or near the HGSE campus, spring of 2016. 

Iliana Gutierrez

Iliana Gutierrez will write and illustrate a children's book that represents ideas through the metaphor of light.  The use of such a metaphor--visually through illustrations, as well as through the simple language of picture books--can depict that not all ideas are bright and clear in the mind.  Even the far away and foggy ideas can be worth pursuing.  While there are many picture books available for teachers to promote self-observation and self-reflection among young students, there are only a few picture books geared towards upper elementary students to reflect on their own personal agency as learners.  In carrying forth the mission of projects such as Learning to Think, Thinking to Learn and Making Thinking Visible, Iliana hopes the children's book can aid teachers, parents, and students in a dialogue about what it is like to have ideas. As part of her residency, Iliana will partner with a fifth grade class as a way of researching the strengths and limitations of her children's book as a pedagogical tool for the classroom.  The project will culminate with an art show of students' own visual metaphors for the pursuit of ideas.

Laura Stickle

Laura Stickle will explore Artful Thinking ideas within a musical context through her work as a choral teaching artist with The Metropolitan Opera Guild at an after-school program in Lawrence, MA. With an eye on writing a curriculum that teachers can use at the beginning of the year to build relationships with and among their students through Artful Thinking ideas and the performing arts, Laura will facilitate an exploration of a different choral piece each week by using the Artful Thinking project’s thinking routine Hear/Wonder/Connect. Documenting the semester-long process through journaling, photos, video, and individual and group reflections, Laura’s project will culminate a collection of student interviews and a display of her documentation at HGSE in May of 2016.

 

Laura has been working in education for over ten years and has been active in the arts since her first dance class at the age of three. She is currently working as a teaching artist with The Metropolitan Opera Guild, an education programs assistant at VSA, and a graduate research assistant at SECURe. Prior to being accepted into the Arts in Education program at HGSE, Laura worked as an instructional coach for an arts-based children's literacy nonprofit, taught English in Seoul, and spent a year as an AmeriCorps volunteer with ReadBoston's Reading Trail program. Laura holds a Vocal Performance degree from Indiana University.   

 

 

2014-2015 Artists-in-Residence

Anjali Rodrigues

Drawing from ideas from PZ’s Out of Eden Learn and Making Learning Visible projects, Anjali Rodrigues will explore storytelling with students from the Urbano Project, under the guidance of PZ Principal Investigator, Liz Dawes Duraisingh. Rodrigues’ students will share their stories and those of the people in their immediate communities through black and white photography and written narrative. Rodrigues is interested in how young learners explore and document the common themes and issues that shape their experiences. The project will culminate a community celebration and gallery walk at the Urbano Project at which the student-artists will share some of the insights they gained with the larger community.

Anjali Rodrigues is an educator, teaching artist, and current masters candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As a teacher in Richmond, California, Anjali worked to design and implement arts-based curriculum at both the elementary and high school level. In her most recent classroom experience, she piloted The American Teenager Project, a photojournalism project that seeks to tell the stories of communities through the eyes of their youth.

Aysha Upchurch

Aysha Upchurch will partner with high-school aged students from the Henderson School, in Boston, to co-create a choreo-poem explorinstudents’ conceptions of causality, consequence, and connectivity. Informed by ideas from PZ Principal Investigator Tina Grotzer’s Understandings of Consequence project, the students will employ Making Learning Visible ideas and practices to document and reflect on their collective and individual process(es). The project will culminate in a performance-exhibit at which the students will perform their choreo-poem and display the evolution of their writing.  

Upchurch is a Washington, DC based dancer, choreographer, and educator who blends her backgrounds for youth advocacy and conflict resolution on the stage. She has been on faculty at George Mason University and Howard Community College and holds a M.A. in International Peace and Conflict Resolution from American University.

Massimo Pacchione

Inspired by ideas from Project Zero’s Art Works at Work project, Massimo Pacchione will meet with and interview Project Zero researchers to find a symbol for each individual or project group - an object, a relic, an experience, a memory - that can be represented in visual form and depicted in a two dimensional way. PZ researchers will be invited to collaborate with Massimo in the making process and the final products will be part of a permanent installation in the new PZ office suite in Longfellow Hall. Pacchione is a San Francisco based visual artist and educator with a dual bachelor degree in Studio Art and Art History from James Madison University and a MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. Pacchione has worked with documentary filmmakers in developing commercial television and film projects. Most recently, his work has focused on gendered histories and mythologies in contemporary American culture.

Tess Landon

Tess Landon will work with Project Zero’s director, Daniel Wilson, to design and create a series of installations that represent some of PZ’s rich history. The displays will present the history of PZ projects, core ideas, and pedagogical "through lines" in the organization’s new office suite in Longfellow Hall. The installations will be designed with an eye to aesthetics, readability, and creativity with a variety of archival materials and objects to produce an interactive, tangible avenue for the organization and its guests to explore PZ’s deep history. Landon’s project will culminate in a gallery walk at Project Zero, in May. Landon was formerly the Director of Education & Outreach for an organization in Chicago dedicated to educating audiences about international human rights crises through the arts. Additionally, she has taught art and literature courses to incarcerated students for the past six years across the US.