Meet the Team
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Executive Director
Teacher, Baxter Elementary School
Board Member, Northern Culture Exchange
Freelance Composer
M.A.T. Elementary Education, University of Alaska Southeast (in progress)
M.M. Music Composition, University of Northern Iowa, 2016
B.A. Music and Philosophy, Middlebury College
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Artistic Director
Adjunct Professor of Art, Drawing, Color Design and 2D Design, University of Alaska Anchorage
Radio Broadcaster, Out North Radio 106.1 FM
Former Commissioner, Anchorage Arts Advisory Commission
M.A. History of Art, Birkbeck College
Post Graduate Diploma in Painting and Printmaking, Brooke’s University; Life Drawing, St. Martin’s School of Art
B.A. Art and Art History, Brooke’s University
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Education Director
Former Educator, Assistant Principal, and Principal, ASD
Board Member, Anchorage Nordical Ski Club, Girls on the Run, South Central Alaska
Owner, Bore Tide Designs and Bore Tide Pretzel Co.
Coursework in Educational Leadership, University of Alaska Anchorage
M.Ed. Portland State University; B.A. Education, University of Oregon
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Advisor
Performer, Entrepreneur, Musician, Educator
Current Board Memberships: Access Alaska, Alaska Jazz Workshop, Institute of the North, Northern Culture Exchange
M.M., New York University
Postgraduate Certificate Jazz, Guildhall School of Music and Drama
B.A. Theater Arts, Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama
Bachelor in Language Arts, University of Bergen, Norway
About.
Mission
The mission of Place.ment is to open interdisciplinary collaboration among young artists about people’s relationship with place.
Vision
We envision a community of educators, creative professionals, community organizers, business people, philanthropists, and students knit together by their passion for art and education, coming together regularly to understand the connection between who we are and the places we live.
“Art and education empower people to understand and express ourselves.”
Rationale
Art and education empower people to understand and express ourselves. Both are particularly important in Alaska today, as debates about resource extraction, environmental protection, indigenous rights, and tourism call into question our relationship with this place. It will take art and education to bring people together amid these debates and to define our relationships with place.
Alaska is not alone in our need for art and education as paths to understanding and connectedness. Our country is divided along place-based political lines, and we have lost many of the forums that historically fostered unity amid disagreement. We spend increasing amounts of time in cyberspaces that echo our own beliefs and polarize our language, making rapprochement through traditional dialogue more difficult.
The symptoms of misunderstanding and disunity change from year to year, but the need for art and education is perennial — it takes creativity to understand relationships, both with other people and with the places we live. Moreover, without an investment of creativity, our relationships with one another and with the places we live become transient and disregarded.
Our program will respond to a deep need for relationship with place by calling attention to it and by providing young people the opportunity to explore their relationships with place together. More broadly, Place.ment will open collaborative explorations into the contexts of young people’s lives — how those contexts shape their identities and are shaped by them in return.
The opportunity to creatively explore relationship with place has been, in other times and locations, an integral part of education. However, in Alaska today, the opportunity for place-based creative practice is dwindling within our public schools. Many of our districts focus on data- and ends-driven curricula tailored to standardized goals. Open-ended creative practice has become a luxury not everyone can afford.
In response, Place.ment will supplement the existing educational offerings of our state: while traditional educational contexts focus on filling our youth with knowledge, we will develop their unique interests and abilities in response to the contexts of their own lives.
