four b

4B -Dude You’re on the Tube – Arts Programs for Teens

Moderator:
   
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Executive Director, the Telling Room
   
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a writer and teacher.  His poems, interviews, and reviews have appeared in magazines including Boston Review, The New Republic, and Tin House and in anthologies including From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great.  With graduate degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, he has taught writing and literature in public and private middle schools, high schools, and colleges in California, Vermont, New York, and Maine and is currently the Executive Director of The Telling Room, a non-profit community writing center in Portland, Maine.

Speakers:
   
Doug Protsik, Director, Maine Fiddle Camp

Doug Protsik has played music all his life since starting piano lessons at age five. In college, he developed an interest in folk music and guitar. After moving to Maine in 1971, he began studying and playing traditional music from New England , adding fiddle, accordion, and country-dance calling to his repertoire. He has performed throughout the United States at folk festivals, concerts, and dances. Doug has also traveled and performed in Europe and spent seven months touring the world learning and exploring the traditional music in countries such as Indonesia , Thailand , and Nepal . He composes, performs, and records old-time piano scores for silent movies, teaches at a variety of academic levels, and provides educational programs to schools and summer camps. Doug is the Director of Maine Fiddle Camp, composes and arranges for the band, and is a full-time musician.

Tessy Seward, Co-founder, ROIL

Tessy Seward has been writing, directing and performing in Maine for fifteen years, most recently with her Portland-based company, ROiL, which she co-founded in 2004. Tessy co-wrote and performed in ROiL's first production, Close to Home, an exploration of anti-gay discrimination in Maine communities that toured the state and was performed in more than 30 towns across Maine in 2005 to raise awareness about the referendum on civil rights. She currently collaborates with other artists to create and perform original work, and she works with ROiL as well as Maine Inside Out to develop and facilitate theater workshops for at-risk youth. Some of her previous Portland-based projects include work at the Long Creek Youth Development Center, Portland High School, and the Youth Building Alternatives program at Learning Works. Tessy and other ROiL members spent time in Louisiana in 2005, 2006 and 2007 leading therapeutic theater workshops for resettled teens in Baton Rouge after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and Tessy co-facilitated a Maine Inside Out workshop for incarcerated women at the Maine Department of Corrections’ Women’s Reentry Center in the fall of 2008. Maine Inside Out is currently partnering with the Maine State Housing Authority to offer performance workshops for at-risk youth living in public housing in southern Maine. Tessy has trained with Theater of the Oppressed founder Augusto Boal at the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory in New York City. She has a Masters Degree in Counseling from the University of Southern Maine, with training in group facilitation, expressive arts therapy, multi-cultural counseling, non-violent communication, and crisis intervention. She is currently a therapist in private practice. Tessy has a B.A. in English from Williams College.

Cathy Plourde, Executive Director, Add Verb Productions

Cathy Plourde: MA in Theatre and Social Change (Vermont College) and a BS, Communication Education (Indiana University of Pennsylvania, '90). As an actor, she received recognition from IUP for Outstanding Achievement in Performance, and while teaching high school, received a National Endowment for the Humanities to study playwriting and directing at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English. In the mid-90's she began using theatre as activism and education writing plays for girls conferences and working with various groups around the state helping them to create their own performance pieces. For several years she's been involved with the Maine Alliance for Arts Education, and helped to create their Building Community Through Arts artist residency in rural Maine high schools program. The Maine Women's Fund, Mainely Girls, and the Knox County Coalition Against Tobacco have commissioned her plays. Workshops and facilitation have been hired by such groups as Where the Girls Are/Portland YWCA, Partnership for a Tobacco Free Maine, Pine Tree Folk School, Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence and several of its affiliates, the Maine Youth Center, Acadia Hospital, Maine Alliance for Arts Education, and Central Aroostook Council on Education. Cathy is a member of the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (elected Focus Group Representative in Theatre and Social Change), a respondent and workshop facilitator for the Kennedy Center's American College Theatre Festival Region I, a member of Dramatists Guild of America, and Adjunct Artist in Residence at the University of Southern Maine.

Johanna Jones Franzel, Director, Generation PRX, PRX Public Radio Exchange

Johanna (Jones) Franzel is the director of Generation PRX (generation.prx.org), a project of the Public Radio Exchange (PRX.org) to support, connect and distribute youth-made radio.  Comprising a national network of over 50 youth radio groups, Generation PRX helps young producers share their work with listeners around the globe.  Before joining PRX.org, Jones coordinated the Community Programs Department at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University , where she co-founded "Youth Noise Network" to train young people in documentary media production.  Over the past 10 years she has taught in settings ranging from classroom to after school to museum.  She currently assists the Blunt Youth Radio Project  teaching radio to incarcerated youth at the Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland .  Jones holds a Masters in the Arts in Education program from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a certificate from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.