Drama Club’s mission is to consistently care for youth who are incarcerated and court-involved by creating space for them to thrive, using improv as their guide. Learn more at www.dramaclub.org.

Raquel is the Youth Program Manager, director of the Urban Explorers after school program, and associate for City Lore’s Education Programs. She is an interdisciplinary artist, facilitator, and activist. (M.F.A. – Playwriting, Columbia University).  Interests: Social justice, activism through the arts, youth development, interdisciplinary art practices, Butoh dance, traditions and political history of (Latin America, the Caribbean and the African diaspora). Her eclectic career spans original multi-media solo performances, playwriting, devising, dramaturgy, and filmmaking.

Recipient of The Map Fund, Doris Duke Recovery Grant, NYFA NYC Women’s Fund, NYSCA Grant and National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Grant, Kennedy Center’s Latinidad Award, Kate Neal Kinley Playwriting Fellowship and the LGBTQIA Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation Playwriting Prize.

As an educator and consultant she co-created, taught and engaged creators in a wide variety of both community and university settings; founding short and long term programs for intergenerational participants. She has partnered with The New York City Department of Education, over 50 public schools, grass-root organizations, prisons, detention centers, shelters, advocacy groups, private academies, and several nonprofit organizations.

Almazan has facilitated, devised original pedagogy for youth development programs with: Columbia University, Ping Chong and Company, Manhattan Theatre Club, LEAP, Brooklyn Academy of Music and Dream Yard.  Lecturer and Guest Lecturer credits include: New School, Augsburg University through The Playwrights Center, Marymount Manhattan College, UC Berkeley, Harvard University, New York University, SUNY Purchase, Carnegie Mellon and Amherst College.

She is Artistic Director of La Lucha Arts dedicated to producing works in collaboration with social movements. Almazan is the Co-President of the Board of Directors of Indie Space.

Piper Anderson (she/her) is a writer, coach, master facilitator, and organizational development strategist who founded Create Forward in 2015. Her career over the last 20 years has traversed the arts, youth development, community organizing, education and the healing arts providing her with an interdisciplinary toolbox of cultural strategies to advance social change.

As a writer and performance artist, Piper’s work has been published in two books, “How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office (Soft Skull Press 2004) and Growing Up Girl (Girlchild Press) as well as numerous publications and journals. She has written and toured two solo performance works, “Black Girl Speak” (1999) and “In Her Memory” (2006-2009). As a company member with The American Place Theatre’s Literature to Life program, she performed an educational theatre adaptation of  Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and adapted James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk into an interactive educational theatre production commissioned by Harlem Stage. Her work in educational theatre was an important training ground for developing her expertise as a facilitator. She has translated her work with young audiences into a transformative facilitation practice with communities nationally.

 In 2016, Anderson was awarded a TED Residency to develop an innovative storytelling project called Mass Story Lab. Mass Story Lab has traveled to more than thirteen U.S cities creating immersive storytelling laboratories that center the experiences of people impacted by incarceration, then channeling these personal stories into instruments of justice. As part of her residency, Piper gave a  TED Talk, “Can Stories Create Justice?” Her talk challenges us to throw out conventional notions of punishment, and to imagine a justice system that builds and restores humanity.

Known for her masterful facilitation, Piper is in high demand for her training, speaking, and consulting with institutions to help them make workplaces and communities more inclusive and equitable.  Responding to growing national urgency to constructively engage across differences, FastCompany turned to Anderson for her strategies on facilitating difficult conversations.

Piper Anderson is a professor at NYU’s Gallatin School and a founding member of the advisory board and faculty of NYU’s Prison Education Program. She has guest lectured at universities across the country including Harvard Law, Columbia University, Georgetown, and Occidental College. She is a New School Writing Democracy Fellow, a Culture Push Fellow for Utopian Practice, Aspen Ideas Fellow, and Civic Hall Organizer in Residence. Piper Anderson has dedicated her life to providing leaders with the generative spaces.

Sarah Calderon is the Executive Director of Creatives Rebuild New York. Previously, Sarah was the Managing Director of ArtPlace America from 2015 to 2020. In this role, Sarah led strategy, finance and operations, management, and grantmaking strategies for higher education. Previously, she was the Executive Director of Casita Maria Center for Arts & Education (Bronx, NY) from 2008 to 2015. During her tenure at Casita, she oversaw the opening of a new, 90,000-square-foot facility for the Center’s arts and education programming and developed partnerships with organizations ranging from Lincoln Center to the NYC Housing Authority. Before joining Casita, she founded and ran Stickball Printmedia Arts in East Harlem, a printmaking and digital arts organization for youth. Prior to that, Sarah was with the NYC Department of Education creating the Annual Arts in Schools Report—a data collection, analysis, and reporting effort for arts education in NYC’s public schools.

Kerry Candeloro (she/her) is a disabled theater worker, currently positioned as the Access Coordinator at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (LCPA). She is also a Disability Consultant with Disney Theatrical Group as well as The Walt Disney Company. In early 2024, Kerry began her tenure as Co-Chair of the Museum, Arts and Culture Access Consortium. She has been professionally affiliated with MOULIN ROUGE! The Musical, New York Theatre Workshop, NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Columbia University, and the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab. As a Disability advocate, Kerry has collaborated with various organizations to bring more visibility to the Disabled community through social media. She is a youth volunteer with YO! Disabled and Proud (California Foundation for Independent Living Centers) and an ambassador with Liberare, an accessible clothing brand. Kerry is currently undergoing the ADA Coordinator Training Program. Her story has been featured on websites like BuzzFeed, NHK, and FreeBird UK.

Tiffany was born and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. Her journey with Drama Club started as a student and she is proud to now call herself a Teaching Artist. She is led by her passion to support, mentor and relate with all youth she comes in contact with. She loves music and theater. Tiffany is a determined and outspoken advocate for youth who have been caught in the criminal legal system. She believes every person deserves to be heard, no matter their circumstances.

Dr. Carla España is an Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education, Puerto Rican/Latinx, and Latin American Studies in the Department of Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She is the co-author of En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students, The Translanguaging Collections: Affirming Bilingual and Multilingual Learners Handbook, and co-founder of the En Comunidad Collective with Dr. Luz Yadira Herrera. Her forthcoming titles with Brookes Publishing in Spanish include two books for teachers using Latinx youth literature in Spanish. Her forthcoming Routledge/Stenhouse text is titled Narrative Writing with Latinx Teens: Testimonios, Texts, and Teaching.

Becky Leifman is the Interim Co-Executive Director of CO/LAB Theater Group. She is also the Treasurer for the Museum, Arts, and Culture Access Consortium, Director of Community Engagement on Broadway’s How to Dance in Ohio, and a TEDxBroadway Speaker. With over a decade of experience in the theater, nonprofit, and disability industries, she is passionate about creating, promoting, and investing in a more accessible and inclusive cultural field and community-based society. She has previously worked as an educational instructor for autistic students, and provided one-on-one support for two individuals with disabilities. Becky has a variety of professional experience at arts organizations; she founded Two Lights Theatre Company (Chicago) in 2007 and worked for The Acting Company and The Play Company in their respective development departments. As a nonprofit and access consultant, Becky has proudly worked with Trusty Sidekick Theater Company, The New Group, MCC Theater, Trinity Theatre Company, and more! In Becky’s earliest NYC days, she produced shows including Sarah Ruhl’s translation of Three Sisters, Ross Mueller’s Construction of the Human Heart, and the Off-Broadway musical, Peter & I. Becky has a BFA in Acting from Syracuse University, and a Graduate Certificate in Philanthropic Studies at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.

Arielle Lever is an Arts Administrator and Teaching Artist, who focuses a great deal of her energy and work around accessibility in theater. She is the current Project Manager of MAC Supporting Transitions, which promotes the inclusion of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities at cultural institutions, particularly through employment. She is a co-founder and Teaching Artist at CO/LAB Theater Group, which provides individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities a creative and social outlet through theater arts. Arielle is also a Teaching Artist at The New Victory Theater, Lincoln Center, and Broken Box Mime Theater. She often runs trainings and consults for companies on theater accessibility practices.

Libby is a poet and community-based artist in Brooklyn, New York. Her impulse as a poet is to uncover the extraordinary in the ordinary, and to write towards personal and collective healing. She received her MFA in poetry in 2018 from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she has received grants from New York State Council on the Arts and Queens Arts Fund to develop works of poetry and multi-disciplinary performance-based work. 

Libby is a firm believer in the power of the arts as a vehicle for collective transformation. In addition to her own creative process, she designs and facilitates arts projects and workshops to engage communities in creative expression. Libby has taught creative writing and poetry to New York City youth in community-based and in-school settings since 2010, and she is currently a teaching artist with City Lore, Community-Word Project, and Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Throughout her journey as a teaching artist, some of Libby’s most meaningful work has been facilitating creative projects and working in collaboration with multilingual learners and newcomer youth. She also serves as the Coordinator for Teaching Artist Project (TAP), a comprehensive training and internship program for working artists who desire to incorporate social justice and social emotional learning into their teaching practice. Through TAP and City Lore’s Artist Teacher Mentorship Program, Libby has also served as a mentor for newer teaching artists. Drawn to interdisciplinary modes of art-marking, Libby is a certified leader in InterPlay, an active, creative approach to unlock the wisdom of the body that uses improvisational storytelling, movement, and song.   

Peruvian drummer and percussionist Hector Morales has combined national and international performance for the past 20 years with his work as a teaching artist in the tri-state area. Morales has taught countless music residencies, primarily in Afro-Peruvian, Latin, and Urban Percussion, through leading arts organizations in the tri-state area. In the year 2015 he received the “Artist Of The Year” award from Young Audiences NJEP and in 2023 he was inducted into “The People’s Hall Of Fame” and received the Token of Appreciation Award from City Lore. In this same year he also became a recipient of the Heritage Fellowship Award by the NJ State Council on the Arts. His credits include creating curriculum for the NYC DOE, leading professional development workshops for music educators and serving as grant panelist for different art councils at the local and state level. As Adjunct Faculty he currently co-teaches a course on Performing and Teaching World Music at William Paterson University. Hector is the author of The Afro-Peruvian Percussion Ensemble, an instructional book/DVD published by Sher Music Co, nominated in the “Best Educational Book of 2014” category by Modern Drummer Magazine. Morales currently leads “The Afro-Peruvian Ensemble,” an all-star group integrated by master musicians of Afro-Peruvian music currently living in the US, as well as the Lima In Blue collective. He also performs with other influential ensembles of the Afro-Peruvian Jazz scene in NYC, including Yuri Juarez’s Afroperuano Group. Some of the stages he has perform at include the Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Smithsonian Folk Festival (US), The National Museum of Peru (Peru), the Society of Musicians and Composers of Chile (Chile), Festival du Monde Arabe de Montreal” (Canada), and Jerusalem Music Festival (Israel-Palestine).

Michael is a theatre-maker, educator, process designer, writer and facilitator. His research and creative practice is focused on civic imagination.  He has a 30+ year history of projects across sectors bringing cultural activity to the work  of public engagement, community planning  and cross-sector coalition building. In 1999, Michael co-founded Sojourn Theatre. In 2012, he co-founded the Center for Performance and Civic Practice. He is currently Civic Collaborations Director for One Nation One  Project and founding director of the Co-Lab for Civic Imagination at the University of Montana.