Shelah Marie began her career as a Teaching Artist in the most divine accident. She was working full-time as a childcare specialist (a “specialist” meaning someone who feeds/changes 8-10 newborns for 8-hours a day) on an Army Base in Germany. She was asked if she wanted to incorporate some arts programming on the base. Not realizing how tough is would be, she enthusiastically said yes. Best mistake ever. Long story short, she created two age-specific week-long Creative Dramatics workshops for the children on base.
-
- Creative Dramatics Camp in Hohenfels, Germany
-
- “Grasslands,” an original play written and performed by students in Hollywood, Florida.
-
- Making Books Sing Residency, 2010
-
- Harlem, New York
At the final showing on base, one girl asked if she could videotape her performance and send it to her delployed father in Iraq, because
“she never spoke in front of people and he would be so proud of her.”
This proved to be the turning point in her then non-existent career as an educator. Since then, Shelah has experimented with hybrid pedagogy from Augusto Boal’s work to movement-based techniques like Viewpoints. Currently, Shelah is interested in taking her artistic/educational philosophies a step further to see how the arts can be used with marginalized populations to explore ideas around identity, community, and how these themes can be artistically deconstructed and reconstructed to suit the needs of each student population.