Arts in Education

HGSE Arts in Education Program Student Profiles

Adrian Anantawan, a professional violinist who was born and raised in Canada, is the founding director of a virtual chamber music initiative at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Center in Toronto. He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, earned a master’s from Yale under the tutelage of Peter Oundjian, and has performed with orchestras in Toronto, Halifax, and Montreal, as well as at the Aspen Music Festival and in Carnegie Hall. He has served as a cultural ambassador for the past two Summer Olympic Games.

AIE students Born and raised in India, Madhu Anantharajan has worked for the past seven years as a freelance illustrator and designer, helping develop material for education projects across India. After receiving a master’s in art history, she worked as a features writer for a newspaper and as a researcher/writer for a school textbook project. She has also conducted creative-expression workshops for both educators and students.

Yarima Ariza, born and raised in Colombia, earned a BFA from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and an MA in interdisciplinary arts from Columbia College Chicago. She comes to HGSE with her two children, Lucas and Penelope, and with twelve years of teaching experience in urban US schools—as an art teacher at an alternative high school in Chicago, as a graphic arts teacher at the second-ever all-girls public school in the US (also in Chicago), and as an art teacher at Miami Edison Senior High in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami. She has also served in the leadership team at the Visual and Performing Arts Academy and worked at an all-boys preparatory school in Miami. Currently she is the international student affairs Intern in the HGSE Office of Student Affairs and the Boston-area Teaching Fellow for Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Connect program.

After receiving bachelor's degrees in music and education from McGill University in 2006, Laura Bouix began working as a band director in the Boston Public Schools and as the director of the Vermont Youth Orchestra Reveille! Music Festival. A part-time student at HGSE, Laura plays in the Brookline Symphony Orchestra, the Lowell House Opera Orchestra, and the Charles River Wind Ensemble. She is an aspiring Argentine tango dancer and an avid cyclist.

AIE students Nick Britton is one of the two communications and curatorial assistants in the AIE office this year, as well as an ambassador for the HGSE Admissions Office. He came to HGSE from a magnet school in Miami called DASH—Design and Architecture Senior High School—where he was teaching intensive reading, gifted English, and creative writing. He completed professional development in the Smithsonian Design Institute at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City, and in 2006 he was named “rookie teacher of the year” by the Miami Dade County Public School District.

Coming most recently from Colorado, Marian Brown is exploring the use of art as a healing device and stimulant of student success in mainstream classrooms. She has run arts-based community-building programs such as Afternoon Arts, where she organized art enrichment programs for schools that have lost their arts funding, and the Combat Paper Project, where she used the process of making handmade paper to help build and heal community among military veterans. Marian has also worked as a teacher in alternative classrooms, as a ski instructor, as head coach for a developmental mogul-skiing program, as an international nanny, and as an independent artist. She is interning with VSA of Massachusetts this year and putting together a solo show of her handmade paper for a spring exhibition in HGSE’s Gutman Library.

Born and raised in Georgia, Anne Buckle received a bachelor's in vocal music education in May 2011 and a bachelor’s in international relations and French in August 2011. A passionate singer/songwriter, she is scheduled to release her first independent country album, Don’t You Remember?, in the fall of 2011. Interested in advocating for global human rights, she has also been working with a women’s rights activist in Afghanistan to promote documentary films in the United States.

Zach Clark, originally from Providence, Rhode Island, came to Cambridge from Charlotte, North Carolina, where he worked as the visiting artist-educator for Freedom School Partners and developed and implemented arts programming at organizations such as Charlotte Emergency Housing, Stonewall Jackson Juvenile Training Center, and ArtsReach. He has also mentored and developed programming for New Urban Arts, an interdisciplinary arts studio in Providence, and maintains an interest in working with arts-based non-profit organizations that serve LGBT youth and students from low-resource communities. In his spare time, he is working as a research assistant at Harvard’s Project Zero this year.

AIE students Ashi Day has earned a bachelor’s in music composition from Bucknell University and a master’s in music composition from Westminster Choir College. She taught elementary fine arts, reading, and math for Teach for America in Miami before enrolling at HGSE, and has also taught numerous children’s choirs, as well as voice and piano lessons. She is also interested in improvisational theater and Dalcroze Eurythmics.

Donna DiBartolomeo joined AIE after managing exhibits and programs in museums in San Francisco and Pittsburgh. During the fall semester she worked as a research assistant on DM2: Developing Minds & Digital Media at Project Zero, contributed two paintings from her series "patience" to the annual fall AIE Gutman Gallery show, and spent time investigating artworks at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Originally from New York, Becky Fisher moved to Chicago to attend Northwestern University. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in music education, she moved to Cambridge, where she taught elementary school music, including chorus, orchestra, and general music, for three years. Throughout these years, she attended a three-summer program at New York University and received a certification in the Kodály Method. Her education and teaching experience have led to interests in music’s ability to create social change and more recently in the potential uses of digital media in arts-based curricula. Currently, she teaches an after-school jazz program in Brookline.

Coming most recently from Amherst, Massachusetts, Val Heron-Duranti is one of the two communications and curatorial coordinators for the AIE Program this year, a senator representative for AIE in the HGSE Student Government Association, and an ambassador for the HGSE Admissions Office. In 2008 Val completed a self-designed bachelor’s degree at UMass, Amherst that she titled Collaborative Arts, Education and Human Development. She has taught dance for eight years at the Amherst High School, cofounding the school's Dance Theater Ensemble, and for the past six years she has designed and directed a children’s multi-arts summer camp. She has also competed in an internationally ranked performing barbershop chorus, placing seventh in a recent competition, and in a barbershop quartet that was named "Best Novice Quartet" in 2011. Val is excited to continue exploring arts integration into curriculum and professional development at HGSE.

Alyssa Liles-Amponsah is from Norfolk, Virginia. She did her undergraduate work at Virginia Commonwealth University in painting and printmaking, minoring in African-American studies. She went on to get her master’s degree from Indiana University in African-American and African Diaspora Studies. During the three years before her enrollment in the AIE program, she taught humanities at an alternative program in Cambridge, working with students who had previously dropped out of high school.

AIE students Bryn Keating, a native of Maine, a lover of language, and a museum aficionado, studied English literature, creative writing, and biological anthropology at Columbia University, graduating in 2004. She has held many jobs since then, including assistant to the director of the Stonecoast Creative Writing Conference, newspaper reporter, and legal assistant. In 2005 she received her Teaching English as a Foreign Language certification in Alexandria, Egpyt, and two years later moved to South Korea, where she taught English language and literature for the four years preceding her enrollment in the AIE program.

Originally from Venezuela, Carlos Noguera grew up in Miami. In 2006, he earned a BFA in education from Tufts University’s liberal arts degree program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He taught studio art at the MFA during his undergraduate years, and afterward taught digital and new media art in the Boston Public Schools, at TechBoston Academy. In 2008 he moved back to Miami, to teach Advanced Placement Sculpture at his high school alma mater, Design and Architecture Senior High. In 2009 Carlos started collaborating with Miami Edison Senior High to help build their art program and eventually became the lead art teacher there. He has exhibited his own visual art work in Boston, Miami, and Holland.

Amy Raymond comes to the AIE program after a four year tour of the United States as the technical manager for the traveling children's exhibition Sesame Street Presents: The Body. Amy's high school interest in technical theater led her to California Institute of the Arts, where she says she spent time creating "strange avant-garde theatrical contraptions," eventually emerging with her BFA in technical direction. Currently she is working as the art curator and gallery manager for HGSE's Gutman Library, while focusing her studies on the exploration of the world and its cultures through the arts, and on the development of interactive, educational scenarios. Aside from working and studying, Amy enjoys geocaching, traveling, eating delicious mac and cheese, and reading.

Coming most recently from San Francisco, Laura Ricci is a clown, actor, and circus arts educator (for both children and adults). She has worked as an administrator for a professional circus training program, as a therapeutic artist at UCSF Children's Hospital, and as managing editor for the American Youth Circus Organization's industry journal, Pyramid. This year, excited about learning how to create more opportunities for artistic expression and community collaboration for children, and dedicated as always to the art of making people smile, Laura has been inspired by passionate educators such as Liz Lerman, founder of the Dance Exchange and visiting artist at Harvard, and Eleanor Duckworth, professor of critical exploration here at HGSE.

Maria Alejandra Rivas, an international student from Quito, Ecuador, graduated with a double major in theater arts and communications from Boston College. While studying at BC she developed the Theater of Hope summer camp for poor children in Ecuador and founded the Boston chapter of ASTEP (Artists Striving to End Poverty). After graduation she developed a small theater program for the Hawthorne Youth and Community Center in Roxbury and later worked as a management intern for the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. She comes to the HGSE Arts in Education program with a deep belief — and a fair amount of experience — in the use of theater as a tool for empowerment through the telling of stories and the building of higher expectations.

Gabrielle Santa-Donato came to Cambridge from New Haven, where she researched child resilience, visual thinking, and creativity at the Yale Child Study Center. Prior to that she served as a fellow at the MATCH school in Boston, tutoring high school students, attempting to start an arts program, and recruiting new fellows. Majoring in English and studio art at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire as an undergrad, she fell in love with the outdoors and worked with her peers to develop leadership skills both inside and outside, meanwhile studying bookmaking and visual thinking strategies as well. Now, inspired by Monica Higgins’s HSGE course on "Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Learning," her work-study research on “innovative practice,” and “many, many talks on creativity,” she looks forward to helping adults use their creativity to solve problems in organizations.

A classically trained pianist and choral conductor, Tyler Turner has conducted orchestras and choirs in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria and has worked as a tutor and assistant teacher in the Memphis public schools. He is spending some of his spare time this year as a teaching fellow with the Boston's Children's Chorus and as a choral artist with the Metropolitan Opera. He looks forward to directing a middle or high school chorus in an urban public school after graduation from the AIE program.

AIE students Coming to HGSE directly from the University of San Francisco, Jacqulyn Whang holds a bachelor’s degree in literature, with a minor in Asian-American studies. She worked for three years with Youth Speakers, a non-profit organization that uses spoken word poetry in public and charter schools in the Bay Area (San Francisco, Oakland, and East Bay), as well as in local community centers and youth conferences. She is interested in integrating self-expressive media, such as spoken word, with high school English curriculum. By studying the effects of artistic expression in the classroom, she hopes to learn more ways to engage students personally and intimately with their education.

Melissa Wolfish was raised in Los Angeles, California, and studied creative writing at Oberlin College. She most recently served as an AmeriCorps fellow with KOREH L.A., the literacy project of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. In college, Melissa gained significant arts administration experience through internships at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts (Washington, D.C.), Center Theatre Group (Los Angeles), and TheatreWorks (Palo Alto). A highlight of her experience at Harvard has been working at HGSE's Development and Alumni Relations office, where she writes and edits content for print materials.

2010-11 AIE Student Profiles

2009-10 AIE Student Profiles

2008-09 AIE Student Profiles

2007-08 AIE Student Profiles

2006-07 AIE Student Profiles

AIE Student Involvement

Events and Exhibits

At the Office for the Arts in Education Program, Room 305 Longfellow Hall, students can find a variety of resources such as:

lists of arts-related courses throughout the university and lists of courses at HGSE that lend themselves to arts focusing
information on possible arts-related field placement sites, internships, and job opportunities
guidance on focusing an Arts in Education program
recommendations for instructors who will support arts-related independent studies
selected resources for arts-related research and a collection of past AIE student courses of study and sample student work on arts-related topics
information on arts activities and resources at Harvard and in the surrounding areas