I’m delighted to announce Katherine Gressel and Myra Margolin as the fall 2011 Createquity Writing Fellows. I can’t wait to see what these two women will come up with over the next five months.
An arts consultant, painter, and longtime lover of murals, Katherine Gressel will use her Fellowship term to delve into the thorny questions surrounding the evaluation of public art. Katherine received her BA in art from Yale University and MA in arts administration from Teachers College/Columbia University, where she focused her studies on the intersection of public art, arts education, and community development. She currently serves as Programs Manager at Smack Mellon gallery, where she oversees the Artist Studio residency program and two arts education programs. Prior to Smack Mellon, Katherine worked as Program Manager for the arts education nonprofit Arts to Grow and served as Director of Partnerships and Development at the Urban Assembly School of Music and Art (UAMA). Katherine is also a practicing visual artist, curator, and writer, and has published and presented scholarly essays on community-based public art in the CUNY Graduate Center art history journal and NYU’s 2008 Social Theory, Politics, and Arts conference. She was a contributing editor and writer to the critically acclaimed Street Art: San Francisco: Mission Muralismo (Abrams, 2009). She has exhibited her artwork at such venues as the Brooklyn Arts Council gallery, Brooklyn Public Library, City Without Walls in Newark, and Windows Brooklyn, and was a 2008 Abbey Mural Fellow at the National Academy of Fine Arts. Katherine’s work can be viewed at www.katherinegressel.com.
Myra Margolin brings a keen focus on media arts, community organizing, and social justice to Createquity for the first time. Currently, Myra is the Program Manager at Wide Angle Youth Media in Baltimore, where she is leading a visioning process to make the organization more youth-centered, integrated into the community, and able to help young people tell authentic stories. She also volunteers at the Baltimore City Detention Center, working with young men who are being tried as adults. With a BFA in film and video production from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and an MA in Community Psychology from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Myra has given talks about youth media methodology at several conferences and published papers on the topic. She taught computer animation to teenagers on Chicago’s South Side and digital storytelling to young women who had recently been incarcerated in central Illinois. During her Fellowship, Myra is interested in exploring the intersection of media, youth and community-based work; participatory, intergenerational and collaborative artmaking; and media advocacy, among other topics. In the meantime, I promise not to pepper her with too many questions about the accuracy of The Wire.
Please join me in welcoming Katherine and Myra to the Createquity family!