Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
New Orleans born and Pennsylvania raised, now a Bostonian artist and educator. I received my BA in Psychology from Stanford University alongside two minors in Philosophy and African/African-American Studies, an M.Ed in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and have been researching power, responsibility, and communication in the workplace for five years. As a mental health and anti-racist consultant, I advise clients in optimizing various goal management in occupational, inter-relational, and personal areas. Topics of expertise include conflict resolution, communication development, and diversity training (race/equity/inclusion/belonging) that actually works.
The Center for Community-Engaged Teaching & Research (CETR) specializes in connecting community organizations to Northeastern professors through those professors' semester-long coursework, enhancing classroom learning and addressing social issues via community-focused projects. CETR promotes this community-engaged teaching as service learning and offers student leadership programs, org partnership opportunities, and professional development. As the Associate Director, I tasked with: • Shaping CETR’s strategic engagement across the University’s colleges, academic or service departments, as well as the greater Boston community to develop a culture of ethical community engagement throughout our collective teaching and research partnership work. • Co-leading the team’s work to connect faculty, campus partners, and community partners around their community-engaged research interests, as well as their scholarship on the impacts of service-learning and community engagement. • Implementing a vision for CETR and ensuring alignment of these efforts with the academic plans of the University.
Urban Improv (UI) is a theater-based program that uses role-play to bring its participants into original stories that address topics ranging anywhere from identity and self-esteem to racism and homophobia. Those themes are then used as vehicles to navigate realistic conflict resolution and teach more productive forms of social and emotional communication. Below is a list of my responsibilities and accomplishments as the Associate Director of this program: • Managed team of ten part-time (20 hrs/wk) personnel; trained them in social-emotional learning (SEL), Universal Design for Learning (UDL), DEIB, and therapeutic improvisation, servicing largely marginalized populations around the Greater Boston Area • Curated all SEL and social justice/advocacy curriculum for our clients, e.g., ‘microaggressions’, ‘family’; also led the development and facilitation of tailored programs for classrooms as small as eight children or for workshops numbering over 400 attendees of various ages. • Networked for and represented RFL at events like First Literacy’s Spelling Bee and Tufts’ Community Symposium; directly collaborated with the Executive Director as an organizational ambassador to build strategic partnership and outreach strategies to current or potential stakeholders from, for instance, MIT's MBA program. • Served as a connectivity leader within the organization, fostering internal programs and activities to enhance core and cultural competencies, de-escalate employee conflicts, and create intentional avenues of leadership transparency
• Frequent lead facilitator for the workshop series, “Raising the Barre”, where over 120 dance leaders from across the world attend forums hosted by leading dance health experts to discuss mental health in ballet. • Conducted seminars for staff members of companies like Alvin Ailey on how to perform dialogic feedback on young dancers using the analyses of Professors Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone in concert with my own research
• Advised MIT TLO’s senior management, associates, and officers in framing anti-racist conversations as an act of love; first by being forward about the studied pitfalls of typical diversity training, then by building consensus around how we can equitably approach interpersonal feedback, social promises, and giving grace • Used a psycho-educational framework alongside situational role-play to enhance conflict management skills in a corporatized, hierarchical workplace through active knowledge building and experiential learning; helped employees of all levels identify the source of problem areas, such as worker retention and fear of retaliation • Collaborated with the TLO’s Executive Director and internal DEI team to organize accessible asynchronous, hybrid, and in-person programming with opportunities for follow-up questions and surveyed feedback
• Contributed to a pre-orientation workshop series for incoming freshman students alongside the First-Year Arts Program (FAP) Director; crafted and taught an interactive masterclass, “The Social and Emotional Learning Curve of Role Play"