We are a community of artists, educators, researchers, administrators, and philanthropists who believe that meaning-making through the arts is a human right.

Sabrina currently runs education and engagement programs for Cal Performances on the UC Berkeley campus, and is founder of the Artistic Literacy Institute for promoting artistic literacy as a human right. She is a long-time teaching artist and teacher trainer, working as a consultant with arts and education government and nonprofit entities since 2006. Before that, she was Executive Director at the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts where she co-founded an affiliate program of the Lincoln Center Institute for Arts in Education between 2000 and 2006. She is author of Partnering Successfully in Schools Today: A Teaching Artist Institute Three-Day Curriculum, as well as several articles on teaching artistry. She received her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in Dramatic Art, has taught at UC Berkeley and Harvard University, and has led dozens of professional development workshops for teachers, teaching artists and administrations throughout the country. Sabrina is a theater artist, mother, and activist on behalf of the role that the arts and artists play in healthy communities and connected societies.

Rica believes the arts build empathy and compassion and provide a convening point for raising the quality of community relations and personal development. Rica is the Manager of Student Engagement at Cal Performances where she develops and implements arts education programs. She is an instructor with Alameda County Office of Education’s Integrated Learning Specialist Program, and is a Multicultural Education Program Diversity Facilitator for UC Berkeley’s Office of Equity and Inclusion. She has taught at the NorCal affiliate of the Lincoln Center Institute, and toured as a manager, performer, and educator with Kaiser Permanente’s Educational Theatre program. She has performed with many Bay Area companies and for 14 years has produced the free monthly series Actors Reading Writers.

David is a dancer, choreographer, and theatre artist based out of Berkeley. For the past 18 years, McCauley has served as the Director of the prestigious Alvin Ailey Summer Camp, offering professional-level instruction to middle-school aged children, ages 11-14. AileyCamp instills “self-esteem, self discipline, creative expression and critical thinking skills,” targeting students at risk of dropping out of school. Through dance, the program provides mentorship, role models, and a creative outlet for children who face such challenges. McCauley also teaches locally, leading the Music of Revelations workshop alongside Melanie DeMore.

Marilyn graduated from UC Berkeley with a double major in English and Dramatic Art/Dance. This launched her on a journey fueled by the ideal that the arts should be a part of everyday life for everybody. She has worked with Bay Area arts and education organizations for the past 18 years including the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, Glitter and Razz Productions, the Shotgun Players, and Creative Education Consulting, as well as with the California Arts Council. She has, at times, been a stage manager, costume and props designer, actor, box office aficionado, administrator, playmaker, bookkeeper, videographer and poet. Currently she holds the coordination of the Artistic Literacy Department at Cal Performances in her tiny but mighty hands.

Laura has worked at Cal Performances since 1991 and previously served for 14 years as the Director of Education and Community Programs. An alum of UCLA (Art History) and New York University (Performing Arts Management), Laura has spent her career in the non-profit performing arts and her work has included fundraising, producing, presenting, and publicizing at institutions as wide-ranging as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Universal Jazz Coalition, City Center, the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York International Festival of the Arts. Committed to the value of arts education, she is former Board Chair at the MOCHA (Museum of Children's Arts) and volunteers both at Oakland School for the Arts and with the Big Ideas competition at UC Berkeley. She has served on the Alameda County Office of Education Alliance of Arts Learning Leadership; Creative Impact—A Consortium of Bay Area arts educators; Berkeley Arts Education Steering Committee; and Berkeley Cultural Trust. She also draws constantly, makes jewelry and paper quilts, and shadow boxes as an active weekend artist.

Serena is a Bay Area native who grew up performing in youth orchestras and chamber ensembles throughout the East Bay and in San Francisco. She received her BA in Music with emphases on composition and violin performance from Swarthmore College (in Pennsylvania), then came back home to pursue a PhD in English at UC Berkeley. While at Berkeley, she developed and taught a pair of integrated performing arts courses (including a course on poetry and performance taught concurrently to Berkeley undergraduates and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute retirees), as well as a series of uppper division creative writing courses for Berkeley Summer Sessions. She's delighted to be a member of the Artistic Literacy team and to have a hand in documenting, supporting, and making visible the work of learning and connection through the arts. She also loves serving on the board of the Community Women's Orchestra, directing the CWO Skills Clinic (a free public program for adult music learners), and performing with her piano trio.

Manuelito Biag

Manuelito is an associate at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where he provides support in the area of networked improvement science. He received his doctorate in school organization and education policy from the University of California, Davis, and previously served as senior researcher at the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Manuelito seeks to bridge research, policy, and practice by studying the design and implementation of K-12 and higher education improvement efforts and their effects on students’ learning and development—particularly those from underserved backgrounds. He is also an award-winning dancer, choreographer and artistic director of SHIFT>>>Physical Theater.

Melanie DeMore

Melanie has a remarkable voice, weaving all the fibers of African American folk with soulful ballads, spirituals and original music. Melanie facilitates vocal workshops for professional choirs, community groups, and people who just need to raise their voices. Her Sound Awareness program has been presented in prisons, schools and youth organizations through-out the US and New Zealand. Melanie was a California-Artist-in Residence with the Oakland Youth Chorus as a conductor, musical director/conductor for the Bay Area Woman's Chorus and acapella singing teacher at St. Paul's School in Oakland.

Violet Juno

Violet discovered that art has the power to bring joy and wonder but also be a catalyst for deep thinking and transformation. She seeks to create an engagement with artworks that is not just what is happening on stage or on site but also what audience members conjure in their minds of the various strands to take with them when they leave. Violet is a passionate teaching artist who has taught performance and a wide range of artistic media to schools and community groups. She serves as Creative Community Engagement Coordinator of the Alameda County Arts Commission and believes everyone should have access to the arts.

Amber Lamprecht

Amber has worked in literacy education for over sixteen years. The majority of this time was spent teaching students in clinics using multi-sensory teaching methods in a one-to-one setting. In 2001, with Niku Bolourchi, she formed the Literacy and Language Center to work with people of all ages and abilities. Music has been an integral part of her life since she was 8 years old. She’s been a professional musician in orchestras, symphonies, jazz combos, big bands, soul bands, country groups, singing leads and back-ups and doing studio work for as long as she can remember.

Carol Ponder

Carol has been onstage since she was eight years old. A professional actress with a long resume in all kinds of theater and occasional on-camera work, she is also an award-winning concert and recording artist. As a singer of Americana, she specializes in a cappella balladry and storytelling traditions of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, where her family has lived since the late 1700s. She also accompanies some songs and stories with guitar, autoharp, and spoons. In her solo concert, Appalachian Roots, she has appeared on the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, at the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh, Northern Ireland, and at dozens of other arts centers, clubs, civic organizations, and scores of PreK-12 schools in the USA. Since 2012, Carol and her husband, Robert Kiefer, have toured My Father’s War, an original two-person storytelling and music performance based on Carol’s father’s WWII memoir as a fighter pilot in the European Theater. In addition to the performance, Carol and Robert provide workshops and residencies for veterans and civilians, using My Father’s War as the catalyst for healing and understanding. Since 1987, Carol has worked as a multiple award-winning Teaching Artist and consultant in education through the arts.

Kelly Sicat

Kelly is Director of the Lucas Artists Residency Program at Montalvo Arts, an international multi-disciplinary artist residency that influences the areas of education programs, including the development of model teaching artist program & fellowship; an annual thematic artistic program; public programs and literary arts; and the launch of a significant sculpture program at Montalvo Arts Center. Previously, Sicat was coordinator for 7 years at Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Arts’ LACMALab, a bridge between educational and curatorial practice that examined new ways of bringing contemporary artists into the life of an institution for the purpose of activating the permanent collection and engaging audiences of all ages.

Leslie Simon

Leslie has taught at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) since 1975, when she founded Poetry for the People, a class as well as a publishing collective. For many years she taught Women in the Arts, Women and Literature, and Contemporary Women Writers and Poets at CCSF. A poet and writer, she has published essays and poetry in various journals and anthologies, as well as several collections of poetry. She co-founded Groundswell, an interdisciplinary studies department at CCSF dedicated to architectural literacy and affiliated with the museum studies program. Simon has received hero awards from KQED and 92.7 FM and the Raymond Shonholtz Visionary Peacemaker Award.

Carolyn Wright

Carolyn is Director of Programs at the Maui Academy of Performing Arts, where she has expanded and deepened school and community partnerships for 10 years. A long-time teaching artist, Carolyn began working for MAPA as a drama specialist for the Voices program in 1998. Prior to moving to Maui in 1991, Carolyn performed in and directed shows for Kaiser Permanente's Educational Theatre Program in the San Francisco Bay Area as a founding member of the troupe, where she also designed and implemented cross-peer education programs for middle and high school populations. Carolyn earned her BA in Political Science from Duke University and her MA in Elementary Education from the University of Phoenix. She is also a licensed elementary school teacher in Hawaii.