Artist Spotlight Archives - Arts for Learning Virginia

New Artists: Adding Depth, Passion, and Talent to our Roster

June 24, 2025 By Cindy Sherwood

We’ve welcomed a number of new teaching and performing artists to our professional roster in recent months—and we wanted to share a brief introduction to each. For more information, click on the artist’s name.

Amanda Wallace is a visual artist whose specialty is encaustic painting. She’s taught art throughout Hampton Roads, Washington DC, and Northern Virginia.

Amina Bryant is a violinist and music educator with a deep passion for working with young students. This spring, she was the teaching artist for one of our Strings Impact residencies in Portsmouth, where students learn the basics of the violin.

Ashlee Rey is an actor who has performed in numerous productions in Hampton Roads. With a background in STEM that included a stint as a supervisory nuclear engineer at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, she has now decided her “heart is with the arts.”

Ashley Ault is a visual artist educator who has worked with students in public schools in North Carolina and Virginia for more than a decade.

Gary “G” Garlic Jr. is a singer and musician who plays piano, drums, bass, and guitar. He’s joining his father, longtime A4L percussionist JuJu Drum, as a performing artist in a new ensemble called One World Beats.

Janae Thompson is a theatrical performer with numerous acting credits in Hampton Roads and beyond.

Kiara Noble is a dancer, musician, and theater artist whose experience ranges from musical theater to ballet, jazz, and lyrical dance.

Nin-Eanna Bryant is a visual artist who has exhibited her work in juried exhibitions and art shows across Hampton Roads.

Sequoia Rodwell-Lacewell is a visual artist in Hampton Roads who paints abstract acrylic paintings and custom watercolors.

Both Nin-Eanna and Sequoia served as teaching artists for our IDEAL residencies this spring.

We’re pleased to report that we’re also on-boarding some additional new artists. By doing so, we expand the breadth and depth of our programming, providing students with an even greater diversity of art forms, artistic expertise, cultural and historical perspectives, and teaching styles. We’ll look forward to sharing more about our other new artists soon!

If you’re an artist who’s passionate about arts education and its potential to touch students’ lives by sparking creativity and a love of learning, we’d like to hear from you. Read more about how to become an Arts for Learning Virginia artist here.

If you’re an educator who wants to get a jump on the school year, contact us! You can book any of the artists we’ve shown here or others on our roster. Here’s the full list.

You may also search by program, breaking it down by grade level, art form, content, theme, and more: https://arts4learningva.org/program/

Better yet, talk with our expert, School and Community Relationships Coordinator Katie Driskill. She’ll help you explore options that are just right for your students. Reach her at 757-961-3737 or Scheduling@Arts4LearningVA.org.

RAISE Up in Hampton City Schools

May 21, 2025 By Cindy Sherwood

“As a teaching artist, when we meet a kid, they’re a whole entire person. They have experiences and not all those experiences are pleasant, so coming to the classroom with that mindset and knowing that they carry baggage with them as do we… it’s about approaching them with compassion but also recognizing that they’re more than just their trauma.” Jackie Adonis, Arts for Learning Virginia Teaching Artist

Nancy Eason’s second grade class at Armstrong School for the Arts, where Jackie Adonis worked as a RAISE resident teaching artist.

When Jackie and A4L’s Valerie Davis worked in Hampton City Schools’ classrooms this spring, they came equipped with two years of intensive training focused on student well-being and trauma-conscious, healing-informed teaching. Their residencies were part of a five-year, multi-state initiative developed by Young Audiences/Arts for Learning (National) called Responsive Arts in Education (RAISE). The program takes teaching artists and puts them in the classroom with educators to help integrate the arts into the curriculum.

“Young people are hardwired for the arts. Arts integration training and these strategies align perfectly with learning goals for all subjects. We appreciate the efforts of Heather Goode, principal of Moton Early Childhood Center, and Dr. Tiffany Geddie-Suggs, principal of Armstrong School for the Arts, for providing unique opportunities like this in HCS,” said Kelly Dee, HCS visual and performing arts curriculum leader.

In twice-weekly sessions, Jackie Adonis worked side-by-side with Armstrong’s Nancy Eason, a second-grade teacher. The two developed lesson plans together, and Jackie established relationships with children in the class.

“The best part was watching each student’s character development over time,” Jackie said. “Seeing their progress was absolutely breathtaking. I saw shy students get out of their shell.”

Jackie demonstrated ways to integrate different aspects of theater in the classroom. Kids voted and chose a book to make into a play, which Jackie adapted and students performed in front of a large audience at an A4L community engagement night.

“We Don’t Eat Our Classmates” featured T-Rex characters and a theme of friendship. Children created the sets and costumes, with one student sewing the dinosaur tails and another student composing music for two sections of the play. Students who chose to be on stage memorized their lines, with only the narrator using a printed script.

The RAISE experience for Jackie was “more than just a play or playing some theater games with them when I was in the classroom. We were reinforcing literacy. We want to build strong learners,” she said. “We were also helping the kids explore. They get to try something new; they get to challenge themselves to go out of their comfort zones. How do they know what they’re good at unless they try something different?”

The community engagement night also highlighted Jackie in a different role, sharing her Filipino culture by teaching kids and family members Itik Itik, Dance of the Duck. Three other A4L artists— Ashley Ault, Dai Poole, and Gary Garlic—also presented rotating workshops for an estimated 250 in attendance. Click here to view pictures of the evening by J.B. Digital Photography that are free to download: https://bit.ly/RAISEArmstrongphotos

At Moton Early Childhood Center, A4L’s Valerie Davis worked twice-weekly this spring with a group of 20 four- and five-year-old children.

“I love working with the little ones,” Valerie said. “They’re like sponges and they absorb so much. I got to teach them some songs and some different ways of saying hello and goodbye in a different language. And they loved that. They eat that up. So, to see them absorb the story and then be able to give it back to me the same way I gave it to them is incredible.”

She said she always brought her drum to class, calling music the “catalyst” for engagement with these early learners.

“I’ve had students where the teacher has said the student doesn’t really participate in different activities, but when I come in, by that second day, the student who was very quiet, very shy is eager to tap that drum and to do the songs.”

Arts for Learning also hosted a community engagement night for Moton Early Childhood Center, with rotating A4L workshops by Jackie, Gary Garlic, Dai Poole, and Amanda Wallace. Click here to view and download free photos: https://bit.ly/RAISEMotonPhotos

For Valerie, implementing RAISE techniques in the classroom is more difficult when she’s there for a single session, as opposed to the longer-term residency at Moton. For Jackie, a Virginia Beach resident, the biggest challenge of her RAISE residency was a more pragmatic one that many of us can relate to: “The traffic driving to and from the Peninsula. But honestly, once I was in the classroom, everything was smooth sailing.”

Many thanks to our RAISE partner, Hampton City Schools, for their tremendous support. Plans are still being formulated for Arts for Learning’s final year of RAISE, which is described as “a five-year, multi-state project designed to address the current, urgent needs of young learners through forging a new model of development and partnership for teaching artists and school support teams, who work together on in-depth, customized, trauma-informed and culturally responsive-sustaining arts in education residencies. The project is funded by the U.S. Department of Education.”

Young Audiences’ Melissa Gawlowski Pratt, YA’s Director of Strategic Partnerships & Network Relations, developed the RAISE initiative (pictured second from left). She met with A4L’s Aisha Noel (third from left), Valerie Davis (far right), and Moton educators to observe the program in action this spring.

We appreciate Young Audiences/Arts for Learning’s support and guidance throughout RAISE, which has included site visits for selected staff members to New Orleans and Denver, lesson plan swapping, and discussions of implementation related to evaluation and best practices.

A4L’s Anna Heywood Green and Aisha Noel (second and third from left) meet with teaching artists and educators during a site visit in October 2024 to view Young Audiences of Louisiana’s RAISE program.

Program Spotlight: “The Crack in Everything”

November 15, 2024 By Cindy Sherwood

Arts for Learning storyteller Robin Vivian says she was skimming her daughter’s PTA newsletter recently when her jaw dropped.

“If I were in a car, it’d be like the brakes going [SCREECH]! I thought, that’s incredible because I have literally spent the last year creating this show that’s about accepting imperfection and the concept of looking at it in a different way.”

Robin was reacting to this year’s theme for Reflections, “Accepting Imperfection.” Reflections is a National PTA-sponsored program. Each year more than 300,000 pre-K through 12^th grade students make original works of art in response to a student-created theme.

Robin’s program for Arts for Learning Virginia is called The Crack in Everything. The title comes from a line in a Leonard Cohen song: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

“[Hearing that line] immediately reminded me of one of the first stories I ever learned called The Cracked Pot,” Robin says. The story, which Robin tells in her program, illustrates the beauty that can be found in imperfection, a Japanese concept called “wabi-sabi.” Sharing three multicultural tales and one personal one, Robin uses the wabi-sabi elements of imperfection, impermanence, and incomplete to help students reframe themselves and their experiences.

Robin’s role as the mom to a daughter in elementary school influenced how she developed her program—from her daughter’s distress about needing a tutor to the amount of time that age group spends on social media, including watching YouTube videos where they see others with seemingly perfect lives.

“I imagine that it would be very easy to watch that and say, ‘Hmm, my life doesn’t look like that, my photos don’t look like that. There must be something wrong with me,’” Robin says. “If they don’t have an outlet to talk to someone about it then they start to make their own narrative and that narrative can very easily go to ‘I’m not enough’ or self-blame or ‘my family’s not enough’ or ‘I’m different,’ which can equal ‘I’m bad’ or ‘I’m not enough.’”

Robin uses the story of The Stonecutter to address that negative narrative. By the end of the story, the stonecutter realizes he had everything he needed, from the very beginning, to be content.

Whatever you have right now, you focus on what you have instead of what you don’t. That’s happiness. You don’t need anything else. So that’s the part of wabi-sabi that’s incomplete.”

The Crack in Everything is highly interactive. In one portion, for example, students come onto stage to act out a scene and in another they call out guesses related to a “mystery box” Robin brings out—what do its contents of a chocolate chip cookie, Popsicle, Slinky, and Silly Putty have in

common? (Think about it and find out if your guess is correct at the end of this story!)

Along with some humorous moments, the program has a part that’s both difficult to hear and that almost everyone can relate to. It’s Robin’s own story from fourth grade when she desperately wanted a best friend—plus a 90’s-era “best friend charm” to display to her peers—and wound up being rejected in a cruel way. But in the program, Robin shows that the story doesn’t end there. Although she never did become friends with that particular girl, years later in college she met a young woman, Fayth, similar to herself (“very goofy and a lot, just like me.”) Robin had told Fayth her painful story from fourth grade. And on Robin’s 20th birthday, Fayth surprised her with a best friend charm. They remain best friends today, along with A4L teaching artist April Uhrin.

It’s a lovely twist to the story, demonstrating the ever-changing aspect of life, or the wabi-sabi idea of impermanence.

But the story doesn’t end there either.

“When my daughter was in first grade, kids came to her and said she shouldn’t talk to this other little girl because that little girl was weird. And she was struggling with that,” Robin says. “So I told her the story that I just told you. And I watched it transform her. She realized that if she would do that, it would be very similar to what those girls did to me. And that’s hurtful. And I watched her become a kid who cares about other people and she learned compassion. And so that story went on. And she was nice to that little girl.”

That right there is part of the story. The story is the wabi-sabi. That’s the beauty. We all experience things that are painful. We all go through things. Everything ends from time to time. But when we share that experience of someone else hurting, magic happens because we realize that we’re not alone. We have each other. And there’s nothing actually wrong with us. It’s just part of life.”

Robin is a professional storyteller, actor, and educator who’s based in Northern Virginia. If you’d like to book Robin for your school, library, theater, or community center, contact Katie Driskill, School and Community Relationships Coordinator, at 757-961-3737 or scheduling@Arts4LearningVA.org.

The answer to what a chocolate chip cookie, Popsicle, Slinky, and Silly Putty have in common is that they were all created by mistake—from imperfection comes beauty! As Robin puts it, who wants to live in a world without chocolate chip cookies?

Teaching Artist Profile: Dino O’Dell

October 14, 2024 By Cindy Sherwood

(Many thanks to Arts for Learning Maryland for this terrific article and interview with Dino O’Dell. Below is a lightly edited version.)

Music moves us. Its rhythm, melody, harmony, and lyricism catches our ears, inspires us, stirs our imaginations, and sticks in our heads. If you ask us, that sounds a lot like great teaching!

Dino O’Dell uses the power of music to teach and engage students of all ages. A teaching artist, award-winning musician, and former elementary school music educator, Dino has been writing and performing for young audiences for 20 years. Today, he travels across Virginia (and the country!) to perform participatory assemblies that transform traditional academic lessons into joyful, fun, and creative experiences.

“My background is in children’s theater,” Dino says. “It’s shaped my teaching philosophy. The goal is to create ways for students to engage with the performance—whether it’s through clapping, singing, or movement. We simply tap into what already resonates with students—such as music and stories.”

Dino’s programs cover topics like science, outer space, geography, history, and animals. And by bringing young viewers into the performance, he’s creating memorable learning experiences for kids and their teachers.

For example, in Imagine Your Journey, Dino teaches students about the continents, using catchy tunes that encourage students to sing along and make corresponding dance moves. For North America, students mimic a basketball shot, nodding to the popular sport in the region; for South America, they swim in the Amazon; and for Europe, they eat an imaginary Italian pizza!

Movement and lyrics contain information. Rhythm and melody make it easier to recall,” Dino explains. “Music is the key that opens the door to the room of knowledge. And the knowledge contains the content derived from the lyrics and dance moves.”

Dino incorporates many styles of music into his work, including blues, folk, reggae, ska, funk, and classical. “Exposing kids to a variety of styles and structures is so powerful,” he says. “They may not recognize that they’re hearing a jazz tune, but they feel a different kind of groove, they experience syncopation, and in the process, their awareness of what’s out there and what’s possible expands.” Here’s an example!

At Arts for Learning Virginia, we see a truth illustrated in all of Dino’s programs and those of our other teaching artists: creativity uniquely resonates with young people. “Kids are naturally creative,” Dino says. “In many cases, they aren’t self-conscious yet, and convincing them that what they’re learning is also fun and interesting is easy. It’s a beautiful thing to be a part of.”

Dino will be on tour in Virginia the week of February 24th, 2025. We’re booking visits to schools, libraries, and community centers now!

To learn more about Dino and explore his programs available for your school or classroom, visit his artist profile on our website or contact Katie Driskill, School and Community Relationships Coordinator, at 757-961-3737 or scheduling@Arts4LearningVA.org.

Free Family-Friendly Art Series in Hampton

July 7, 2024 By Cindy Sherwood

Utpalasia
Taikoza
Katherine Willet helps children with take-home art.
Curtis Blues
Storyteller Via Goode
Stephanie Lask's Take-Home Poems workshop
Nathan Richardson as Frederick Douglass
Art Song Duo
Rainbow Puppet Productions
Storyteller Dylan Pritchard
Rita Cohen
Harold Wood
Storyteller and actor Valerie Davis

It’s almost time for our favorite family art series, designed especially for the summer! A Splash of the Arts kicks off this Saturday, July 13 from 10am to 4pm at the Hampton History Museum. Admission is free! And this Saturday is just the start—you can enjoy “Splash” on July 20 and July 27 too. With no-repeat programming, be sure to visit all three Saturdays when you’ll have the chance to interact with Arts for Learning’s professional performing and teaching artists.

“Each year Splash of the Arts is the highlight of our summer,” says Aisha Noel, Arts for Learning’s Programs and Community Engagement Manager. “It’s a great way for the community to come together to enjoy learning for the whole family, engage in interactive programs from our artists, and leave with a feeling of togetherness.”

This is the third year Hampton City Schools Fine Arts Department has sponsored A Splash of the Arts, school-age programming that showcases summer learning by Arts for Learning’s musicians, dancers, storytellers, and visual artists.

“A Splash of the Arts is an extension of our elementary arts and literacy program,” says Kelly Dee, Hampton City School’s Visual and Performing Arts Curriculum Leader. “We bring Arts for Learning into the schools every year for performances that our students may not have the opportunity to see and hear, and it was a natural growth of what we do in the schools to extend it into summer learning and invite the community to come out and see performances during the summer.”

In addition to being free family entertainment, the educational aspect of “Splash” is paramount.

Arts for Learning is the premier partner to bring in high quality arts performances for our students,” Dee says. “The connections to all areas of learning—math, language arts, social studies, even science—are always present in any performance that we either bring in the school or do in the summer as well.”

So don’t miss this year’s outstanding lineup of artists—as Dee says, “The performances keep on getting better and better and better!”

Here’s a week-by-week breakdown of what you’ll see:

July 13: Move to the Filipino “Dance of the Duck;” celebrate African American history with Frederick Douglass; listen to instruments from around the world; learn the hidden meanings of traditional slave tales; experience spoken word poetry combined with live music; be awed by colorful Rainbow Puppets; or make your own puppets to take home.

July 20: Experience the thunderous rhythms of Japanese taiko drums; listen to classic stories from Mark Twain; sail the Caribbean Sea on the waves of steel drums; step into the world of improvisational theater; explore the impact of music on mental health; dance, sing, and clap to musical stories about friendship; and write and illustrate your own poems to take home.

July 27: Fall under the spell of a tricky magician; explore the legends of Mount Everest through dance and music; laugh out loud to multicultural folktales; be inspired by a powerful story of escape to freedom; get up and dance across the continents; and create your own take-home bookmark or mixed media work of art.

“We’re excited to bring 24 different performances and hands-on workshops by professional artists at no cost to attendees,” Noel says. “We can’t wait for the community to experience different cultures, create take home artwork, and enjoy some good family fun. See you soon at the Hampton History Museum.”

Check out the full schedule of activities and performances here: https://sites.google.com/hampton.k12.va.us/familyarts/home

The Hampton History Museum is located at 120 Old Hampton Lane in Downtown Hampton. There’s free parking in the garage across the street from the museum and there’s no admission fee to the museum during Splash. Snacks will be available in the Great Hall for children and teens 18 and under, while supplies last.

New Artists: Adding Depth, Passion, and Talent to our Roster

RAISE Up in Hampton City Schools

Program Spotlight: “The Crack in Everything”

Teaching Artist Profile: Dino O’Dell

Free Family-Friendly Art Series in Hampton

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