Participate in discovering/creating responses to this question by attending the sixth Performing the World conference: Performing the World 2010, September 30-October 3, 2010, New York City (hosted by All Stars Project, Inc and East Side Institute for Group and short Term Psychotherapy)

“Can Performance Change the World?”

Performing artists, community organizers, theatre workers, educators, scholars, youth workers, students, social workers, psychotherapists, psychologists, medical doctors, health workers, and business executives are coming from 31 countries to discuss/perform that question and their responses to it.  Performing the World 2010 is well underway.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share  with you some of the nearly 100 presentations, workshops and performances that will be featured at this year’s Performing the World. Here are samplings of theatre related sessions and presentations dealing with performance, health and wellness. Future posts will highlight sessions on performance and education, performance and trauma, and performance and mental health.

Play On Stage and Off

A Day in the Life of the World – The Living Theatre has been pushing the boundaries of the theatre and working to change the world since 1947.  Founder and artistic director Judith Malina and company members will lead a workshop on Living Theatre performance techniques and a discussion on the Living Theatre’s perspective on performance and social transformation.

Performing Change – One morning a group of young people fan out through the downtown streets stopping people at random to engage them in conversations about problems in their community and what they think needs to be changed in the world.  A few days later this group of young people present a performance illustrative of the concerns raised on the streets. Members of the Street Spirits Theatre Company, based in British Columbia will share their play-creation process.

Towards a New Educational Theatre with Chinese Characteristics – Huizhu Sun, President of the Shanghai Theatre Academy, will share his efforts to introduce devised and educational theatre in China based on traditional characters derived from Chinese Opera.

Reinventing Avant-Garde Theatre – Projekt Theater Studio in Vienna has transformed itself from a classical left avant-garde theatre to a community performance space, the Butcherie, creating new performance forms with immigrants, refugees, women and the elderly.  Founder and artistic director Eva Brenner will discuss these changes and lead a workshop in the Butcherie’s performance techniques.

Bubbles on the Subway – Play in Unexpected Places – Throughout 2009 Kristen Pedemonti played with people on the subways and streets of New York City using bubbles as a means to engage.  She wanted to help people remember what it is to play and demonstrate play’s potential to help people grow.  Pedemonti will share her experience and explore how adult play can change energy, shift focus and open us up to each other.

Performance and Health

Patch Adams – the Clown Laureate of Medicine, comes to Performing the World for the first time.  He will share his work from around the world, bringing performance and hope to the sick and suffering.  In addition to his own workshop, Patch will be joining Jim Mangia, executive director of St. John’s Well Child and Family Center in Los Angeles, and other innovative doctors on a panel entitled, “What is Health?”

The Performance of Resiliency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital – Oncology nurses from John Hopkins Hospital and performance coaches from Performance of a Lifetime share how performance games and workshops helped the nurses to regain the sense of humanity that initially led them to professional nursing.

The Power of Performing Our Story – Lewis Mehl-Madrona will share her work helping people transform the stories of their illnesses into performance and discuss healing as social performance.

Clowning at Hospital Changes the World – Clownetterna, a Swedish hospital clown group, brings performance to children in hospitals, and shares the special magic of the clown/child encounter.

Housing the World

The PTW 2010 Housing Committee is busy securing free housing for the hundreds of performance activists and scholars who will be attending. They have already secured, as of this writing, 80 beds for visitors in households throughout the five boroughs of New York City.

If you want to stay in a NYC home while at PTW, you must fill out a housing form (available at www.performingtheworld.org). The deadline to apply for housing has been extended to July 24. Housing forms will not be processed until conference registration is received. Additionally, if you live in the New York metropolitan area and would like to host a performance activist or scholar from around the world, please contact Jenny or Esther at 212-941-9400 x 414, or fill out a form on the website (http://eastsideinstitute.org/page63/page63.html).

Conference Schedule

Thursday, September 30, conference begins at 5:30 PM

Registration and Opening Reception

Friday, October 1

Concurrent Sessions and Evening Performances

Saturday, October 2

Plenaries, Concurrent Sessions and Evening Performances

Sunday, October 3

Concurrent Sessions and Closing Plenary

Conference ends at 6:00 PM

Registering for the Conference

Registration for PTW 2010 can be completed online at (http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=204261) or contact Melissa Meyer at 212-941-8906 x 304.

I’m beginning to write a chapter on the state of Critical Psychology for a Chinese journal and I’ve spent a few hours flipping through writings, both mine and colleagues of mine. It’s part of how I create an environment for having a new thought, for allowing others (including myself!) inspire me. One of  the things I re-read was a piece I wrote in 2005 for a book of narratives by psychologists about their life and work. (There’s some interesting lives in the volume, so you might want to check it out:  Yancy, G. and Hadley, S. (Eds.), (2005) Narrative identities: Psychologists engaged in self-construction. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.) One part of the essay did spark an idea for something I want to address in the new article I’m writing. I want to explore the distinction between Critical Psychology as an academic subject and critical psychology as a daily practice anyone can engage in. Over the last decade, from what I see and experience, the distinction is blurring some, and that’s a good thing. Here’s the excerpt. (If you want to read the entire essay, it’s called Performing a Life (Story).

“Hi, my name is Lois Holzman. I teach psychology. I’m out here today because I think it’s so important to support young people doing something positive for their communities. That’s what the All Stars Talent Show Network, a city wide anti-violence program, is. I’m talking to people like you and asking you to support the young people of the All Stars by giving a dollar or 5 dollars or 25 dollars.”

This was the “R and D” for what became known in the activist community of which my work is a part as “the street performance.” Like all the programs my colleagues and I created, the All Stars Talent Show Network was built by volunteers like me reaching out to ordinary people—for financial support, for participants, for audiences, for fellow builders. For years we had gone door to door in city apartment houses and suburban homes. Now the idea was to talk a little bit to a lot of people. We created a 45 second “rap” that could stop and engage passersby on NYC’s busy street corners. Five or six of us set up a literature table as home base, fanned out a bit into the crowd, made eye contact with someone and delivered our personal versions of the rap. Those who were interested we would speak with in more depth at another time. (We invited people to give us their names and phone numbers so we could call them back, give them an update and ask them to contribute more. Many, many did.)

Of all the research I’ve done, this is the project I’m most proud of. Today the All Stars not only continues to reach tens of thousands of New York City kids, but through its expansion to cities up and down the east and west coasts, thousands more are participating. My involvement with this extraordinary youth development/supplemental education project is many-faceted (some of them more psychological in the traditional sense), but to have contributed in this way is very special to me.

How was it that I and artists, actors, social workers, teachers, doctors and secretaries could do this? We could and did by performing as other than who we were. We created the “stage” upon which we could perform bold and friendly and outgoing and proud of what we were doing, rather than behaving shy and intimidated and embarrassed. And in doing so, we became bold and friendly and outgoing and proud.

This kind of grassroots fundraising is essential if you’ve decided to be independent from government, university and corporate funding (as all the projects I’m involved in are). But it’s more than just a way to raise money. It’s community organizing. It’s relationship building. It’s giving people the opportunity to do something small. It’s allowing them to be touched and to be giving, if they choose. It’s finding out what people think. It’s discovering that they care. For about twenty years I regularly talked in this way to people on the street and at their doors, as a community organizer who happens to be a psychologist. It’s an antidote to cynicism.

“As progressives we have come to believe that if people address the issue of human development—in direct and practical ways—we might indeed change the world.”

So reads the title page of a booklet the East Side Institute put out several years ago on our history, philosophy and programs. I was reminded of this during the week when I was reading the dialogue among our faculty (myself, Chris Helm, Carrie Lobman and Fred Newman) and students in the Institute’s Social Therapeutics Online certificate program. The 20-week course is winding down and people are revisiting what we’ve read, written and said in reflecting together on the impact (or not) on our lives of what we’ve been doing. The conversation is too rich to keep private and, with the permission of the students and the rest of the faculty, I will share some of it on this site.

Alex is a theatre director and on the drama faculty at a university in South Africa. She’s been involved in community theatre and performance work with adults and young people for years. Throughout the course, she’s been sharing the performance work she’s doing with men in prison, and here she tells us of their conversation at the end of the program.

I had the most amazing group conversation with a small group of the men I have been working with in prison.  It was part of an evaluation of our process, and also part of my research (as a university teacher, I do need to always ‘explain’ what I do), and also part of our process together as we talked about what we believed drama and performance mean for us.  What they talked about was an enactment of all the things that social therapy says is developmental, growthful, educational, about group building through performance.

This group has certainly not been framed or established as a therepeutic group, yet each person talked about how therepeutic their involvement with the group and our activities had been.  I need some more time to listen to the conversation again (which I recorded) and process it all – there were just so many beautiful gems which dialogue with the theory we have been reading in Vygotsky at Work and Play.  In particular, I have just read the last sentance of chapter 2 – “my proposal goes in the opposite direction, namely, that education could be advanced if we consider the teacher as therapist”.  My work with this group has always been constructed educationally – yet, when we had our conversation yesterday, most of the participants ‘learning’ was articulated therepeutically, or socially.

For example, they all talked about how drama had helped them understand others better far more than any other programme, that through becoming another person through performance, they were able to leave the stress of their everyday lives behind and play with new possibilities, it helped them work well with others, communicate better, and most of all, understand themselves and their futures in new ways.  All of them reflected on how performing had helped them with anger and to understand their emotions differently, particularly relationally:  so that they found different strategies when dealing with conflict or understanding where other people had come from.  One of the participants talked about how he had to go and receive a certficate for something but was nervous, and thought that he would just perform confidence, stuck his chest out and collected it with pride.  ”A”, who is a passionate leader and initiator in the group, talked about how he is now always performing – both on and off stage, as he learns new ways to ‘be’ (and become, although these are my words, not his).  He seemed to see himself as what Lois says about “people are primarily performers, not thinkers or knowers”.

Drama always claims that it does these things that the group reflected on, but this is the first time I have heard a group talk about the effect of their work together in this way.  It was a thrilling hour.  When I think about it and the creative activities we have been involved in over the past few months, I start to understand what Lois talks about as the ZPD not being a zone, but an activity.

In 2004 I initiated a program to support grassroots social entrepreneurs and activist-scholars whose work is too new or innovative or radical to get much support. The program is called  The International Class of the East Side Institute. As of today, over 50 people from five U.S. States and 16 countries have been a part of it. Among them are psychologists from India and Brazil, applied theatre practitioners from Kenya and Canada, community organizers from Uganda and Taiwan, psychotherapists from South Africa and Argentina, youth workers from Nicaragua and Mexico, and educators and social workers from the Philippines and the United States. Coming from different places and professions, they share a desire to change the world-and an eagerness to take advantage of the unique opportunity the International Class offers them to create a global support network, to engage the philosophical, political and psychological issues of their practice, and to study and train as developmentalists with the creators of social therapeutic methodology.

Here is the first issue of The International Class alum newsletter, Reports from the Field.

Enjoy!

Here’s the link to a video of the scened from the Work/Play described below

January, 15, 2010

I was delighted to see The Work/Play – the current production of Youth OnStage! (the youth theatre of the All Stars Project) – featured in a column by Ellen Galinsky in today’s Huffington Post. I work with and am a huge fan of all the All Stars programs and have a special love for its youth and adult (Castillo) theatres. I’ve seen this production and attended the Culture Talk last Sunday that Ellen refers to. In addition to Ellen (president and co-founder of Families and Work Institute), Daniel Banks (founder and director of Hip Hop Theatre Initiative) and Dan Friedman (artistic director, Youth OnStage!) and the young cast of the play created a lovely conversation among equals.

Here is Ellen’s column:

A Tale of Two Worlds: B-School and High School

I’ve spent the past eight years immersed in the science of early learning, working with researchers from the world’s great universities. We have distilled this science into seven essential life skills you can teach your children (not typical academic achievement-oriented skills. Real life skills). The result of this journey is Mind in the Making, a book, awareness campaign, and teaching approach to early learning. The best thing about these skills is that you can apply them to your daily life, no matter how old you are. Each week, I’ll share with you real-life examples of these skills at play, and I encourage you to share your observations with me on Twitter (@ellengalinsky). Here is my first story:

World One:
Picture this: a group of young people from Youth Onstage have created and are performing a play called Work, Play & You–A Love/Hate Triangle at New York City’s Castillo Theater:

Here is one of the first scenes called “Security Check:”
Some of the young people in the cast play security guards; others play students waiting to be checked into their school building. They have obviously created this scene from their own experiences attending inner city schools. Because the scene is so powerful, I will share it with you from the play’s script:
Guard 1: Come on, come on. If you were any slower, you’d be going backwards.
Guard 2: Take that hat off. And get those rainbows out of your pockets.
Student: Hey, man I got the right to have rainbows in my pockets.
Guard 3: Don’t give us no attitude. Empty ‘em. Now!
(Student 1 empties his pockets and exits.)
(Second student comes through.)
Guard 2: Wait a minute. Is that glitter?
Student 2: (holding up the bag) Yes, it is–this backpack is sprinkled with happiness.
Guard 2: Go back outside and clean it off.
(Student 2 goes back out.)
(Third student comes through smiling.)
Guard 2: Discard that smile.
(Student has a hard time getting rid of her smile.)
Guard 2: Do you want it ripped off your face?
(She stops smiling and is waved in. Fourth student comes through.)
Guard 1: Wait, wait, do you see what I see in that bag?
(Guards 2 and 3 look.)
Guard 3: Yes, it’s definitely a glimmer of hope.
Guard 2: (opening bag, taking the hope out) We’ll keep that. If it’s still alive at the end of the semester, you can have it back.
Student 4: Please officer, I need that hope. It won’t hurt anyone.
Guard 2: Hope has no place in school. Get to class.
(Student 4 exits. Fifth student come in looking very sad.)
Guard 1: She looks depressed enough for school.
Guard 2: Yeah, she’s fine, let her through.
(Student 2 returns.)
Guard 1: Her bag’s clean now.
Guard 2: Yeah, but she’s a troublemaker. Scan her.
Guard 3: Okay, assume the position. Spread ‘em, spread em.
(Student 2 holds her arms out and spreads her legs. Guard 3 scans her. Looks in student’s hair.)
Guard 3: Wow! There’s dreams in her weave.
Guard 1: You’ve got some attitude problem, girl. Go home and wash those dreams out of your hair. Don’t come back until they’re gone.
Guard 2: I don’t know what’s wrong with kids these days.
(Sixth student enters.)
Guard 1: This bag has set off every alarm.
Guard 2: Open it up.
(Sixth student takes things out of bag.)
Guard 1: Self respect? You know that’s against the rules here.
Guard 2: Songs? Creativity is banned.
Guard 3: Imagination!
(The Security Guards are shocked.)
Student 6: I need my imagination.
Guard 1: Not here you don’t.
Guard 3: This one’s a real criminal.
All Three Guards: You’re expelled!

As this powerful play, directed by Dan Friedman, continues, there is scene after scene where a character named Work and a character named Play compete for “everyman.” As one of the actors says in the beginning of the play: “When you go to school, you’re forced to leave play at home or on the street or wherever. They just don’t want it in the classroom.”

World Two
I saw this play on Sunday January the 10th, and following the play served as one of the discussants for a conversation with the audience and the cast. Then I went home and turned to the most serious of serious sections of the Sunday New York Times, the business section.

And there I read a front page article by Lane Wallace, entitled, “Multicultural Critical Theory. At B-School? The point of this article is that business school students need to learn the essential skills of critical thinking and perspective taking. As the article says, students need “to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions.”

Lest you think that this is only a radical idea, it is being implemented at such august B-Schools as Harvard and Stanford and the C.E.O. of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, John J. Fernandes, estimates that while about 25 percent of association-accredited schools are changing their curriculum to develop more sustainable leaders now, he expects that figure to reach 75 percent in 10 years.

B-Schools are making these changes because they lead to better results–future business leaders who can possibly make better decisions.

So it was a day of two worlds–the world of high school education where students have to leave their best selves at the door and the world of business schools, where some of the leading institutions are revising their programs to help students obtain important life skills.

Is A Reconciliation Of These Two Worlds Possible?

That is the hope of the students from Youth Onstage and the play’s conclusion. I certainly hope they are right.

Having spent the past eight years studying how children learn and filming many of the best experiments in neuroscience, cognitive science, and child development research, it is clear to me that education must focus on what is learned (content AND life skills) and how it is taught (using techniques that include what researcher Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University and her colleagues are calling playful learning).

I also know that these essential life skills of critical thinking and perspective taking develop early and that there are hundreds of everyday ways that teachers and parents can nurture them. We shouldn’t have to wait until graduate school to try to reintroduce them to students. If we do, we are losing far too many students and potential leaders along the way.

That’s the question for the sixth Performing the World conference taking place September 30-October 3 in New York City. I’m what you could call the “chief organizer” for Performing the World (PTW) conferences and community. It’s a great job because there seems to be no end to the people and projects I find out about through word of mouth, referral and inquiry. Since the first PTW in 2001 performance has gained a lot of ground in the humanitarian, human rights, and social entrepreneurial fields—which just adds more to the performance movement-coming-into-being.

The sponsors of Performing the World 2010 are  the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy (my organization) and the All Stars Project, Inc. For decades, both organizations have worked to create a performance-oriented culture and community, in conscious and direct relationship to progressive social change. Our activities involve all neighborhoods and social strata in New York City, and have created an international network of connections.

For PTW 2010, we ask performance activists and scholars to reflect on and address the political aspects of their performance work; at the same time, we invite social change activists to reflect on and address the performance aspects of their political activities. We are looking for proposals —for panels, workshops, performances, demonstrations, installations, etc. — that address this overarching question.

Performing the World 2010 will be a three-day “performance of conversation” with people from all over the world — scholars and researchers; teachers, therapists, social workers and community organizers; doctors and other health workers; theatre and other performance artists; union activists and business leaders; economists and political activists — on the subject of performance and the transformation of the individual, the community, and the world.

Proposals are due March 1. Spread the word!

Watch Joe Spirito’s Performing the World video!

These days, la Cuidad Juárez in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico is pretty much known for one thing—violent crime. No denying the destruction of life and transformation of culture that’s hit this city so hard. But it is not the whole story (it never is).

Looking at El Paso and the fence that divides the countries

Houses near CASA

I had the privilege and challenge of spending four days last week in this city on the US-Mexico border just south of El Paso, Texas. My colleague Carrie Lobman and I were invited to share the social therapeutic approach to learning, development, therapy and community building with a diverse group of people in Juárez. Our visit was hosted by CASA (Centro de Asesoría y Promoción de Juvenil, A.C.) and the Department of the Humanities, Universidad Autónomia de la Cuidad Juárez, and arranged and organized by CASA’s Miguel Cortez, a graduate of the East Side Institute’s International Class.

Work/Play Under the Mexican Sun

Our work began Thursday morning with a presentation I made to a packed auditorium at the university, entitled, “Como debe Cambiar la Educación: Juego, Performance e Improvisación para el Desarrollo Humano y el Cambio Social.” After that about 80 of the over 100 attendees crossed the campus courtyard to the workshop room. For 3 hours that day and 4 the next, Carrie and I led the group in performing conversations and improv activities, with both words and body. Near the end of the second day, we divided the group (by now very warmed up and into creating together) into smaller groups to design projects to “grow the city and its youth” and then performatorily share them with the large group. They had great ideas, like Cultural Caravan, Urban Complement, Winds of Change, Shoot Me with Your Ball.

A Performing Group

Tere and Miguel

CASA has a strong and solid presence in the poor community of Juárez. Headed by Maria Teresa Almada (“Tere”) CASA’s staff and practice is passionately progressive—unwavering in their conviction that people CAN develop in the worst of conditions. And they have what appeared to us to be a productive, non-hierarchical working relationship with the university. Throughout our conversations with staff, university faculty and students, and young people we never heard anyone blame either the young people who are killing and being killed (hired by the drug cartels to do their bidding) or their parents. They are, instead, focused on the community as a whole taking responsibility for what is going on and working together to provide prosocial things for young people to do.

On Saturday we led another workshop, this time at CASA. The group of about 60 included many teens—some from a CASA high school project and some who don’t go to school but who volunteer with CASA—and women from the community who are involved in CASA programs. Carrie and I saw some new things of value from leading the group in improv games, especially those involving mirroring and creatively imitating each other. One of the most moving was the transformation of both teens and adults when they started playing together, and seeing the teens’ joy when adults imitated them!  In the environment we all built, Vygotsky’s views on play and creative imitation—and their advancement in social therapeutic practice—were living, breathing forms of life.

CASA Workshop Players

At the CASA Workshop

Esben Wilstrup—self-described Danish roleplayer, postgraduate psychology student, and playful activist— and former student and very much current friend and colleague has just launched a blog. He calls it Performing Psychology. Check it out and talk to Esben!

“It is not only a Vygotskian atmosphere where professionals share different backgrounds, but a zone where you may improve your human skills and to help others to perform a better world.” –Ignacio Dalton, educational researcher, Buenos Aires Argentina

“The class has been such a wonderful support system, helping me to deepen my consultancy with the youth and staff I work with in non-profit organizations.  The group has inspired me to be more creative in my work, to take more risks, and to build more.  It has been an honor to be part of such a group that is dedicated to human development, even when life, social, and political circumstances challenge us.”–Kim Sabo Flores, evaluation consultant, Brooklyn NY

“The International Class has made me learn to challenge some of my old beliefs and to peel off the rigid self image that we all try to portray in our life. The cultural and economic differences of all the countries of the student has made us get an even broader viewpoint on all the topics which were discussed.”–Ishita Sanyal, psychologist, Calcutta India

The International Class is a course of study in postmodern and activity-theoretic approaches to human development and learning. Emphasis is on social therapeutics, a methodology utilized in diverse mental health, educational, youth development and community organizing settings in the US and internationally.

I began this program in the fall of 2003 and I lead it with a great faculty. We provide a unique opportunity for practitioners and scholars from the US and countries around the world to study together, learn the Institute’s cutting edge developmental methodology, and build ties and support for themselves and their communities.

A creative playground and postmodern academy, participants create a dynamic zone of development in which they can engage the philosophical, political and psychological questions emerging from their practice.

The ten-month program combines residencies in New York City and seminars, supervision and project development sessions conducted online. Students come together to work with Institute faculty and others in the broader development community and advance their programs and research.

Residencies. The International Class meets at the Institute three times during the academic year (two six-day and one twelve-day residency period) to work together as a group with Institute faculty and associates. Site visits, observations, participant observations and experiential learning activities supplement daily seminar activity.

At Home. In between residencies, students study the social therapeutic method in relation to socio-cultural activity theory, theories of performance, postmodernism, group process and community development. Learning formats include on-line seminars, mentoring, dialogues with guest colleagues of the Institute, supervision and conference calls with faculty and mentors.

The International Class is cross-disciplinary and open to practitioners and scholars with a broad range of educational and life experiences—and a passion for innovation. Applications for the 2009-2010 program will be accepted through July 2009. Tuition is $3200. A limited number of full and partial scholarships are available.

For more information, including dates, applications and scholarship forms, contact me! To read more about the program, go to http://www.eastsideinstitute.org/internationalclass/index.html

I’m excited about a new course offering of the East Side Institute, where I am privileged to be director. It’s entitled, “Conversations with a Black Minority: Postmodern Marxists in Dialogue about a New and Innovative Approach to “Black” Psychology,” and it will be led by four powerful African American women colleagues of mine from whom I have learned immeasurably: Lenora Fulani, Alvaader Frazier, Pam Lewis and Gloria Strickland (bios below).

During the five weekly sessions, they will “unpack” the title of their course—sharing how they understand themselves as a “Black Minority;” in what ways they are postmodern Marxists; what that looks like in their work as psychologists, educators and community activists; why they think such an approach is good for the development of black communities and of all people; and what the challenges are in light of “black psychology” — both the psychology of the black community and that of academics who identify and work with a black psychology. 

“Conversations …” meets Wednesday evenings, 6:30-8:00 PM February 25-March 25 at the East Side Institute. For more information or to register http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=175846

I plan to write about the course here each week. 

Lenora Fulani is a leading youth development specialist who co-founded the All Stars Project in 1981. One of her current projects is Operation Conversation: Cops and Kids, a series of workshops that uses performance to facilitate dialogues between New York City police and Black youth. Dr. Fulani earned her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the City University of New York. As America’s leading Black independent, she has twice run for President of the United States.

Alvaader Frazier, Esq. is a long time community organizer. She received her law degree from Western State University College of Law in Fullerton, California and has worked as a human rights attorney. Ms. Frazier is also a prolific poet, writer and patron of the arts.

Pamela Lewis is the Director of Youth Programs for the All Stars Project. At the All Stars she also serves as national producer of the All Stars Talent Show Network and co- director of the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth.

Gloria Strickland is the Director of the All Stars Project of New Jersey. Prior to heading up the All Stars, Ms. Strickland was the executive director of the Somerset Community Action (SCAP) and the Somerset County Head Start programs. She has a Masters degree in education from New York University.