Community Engagement

Listening for Something We Haven’t Said Yet is a collaborative performance project by painter and performer Timo Kuzme and musician Ry Noss.
The improvised performance is a dynamic exchange between sound and painting, with Noss creating layered sonic textures using brass and woodwind instruments processed through effects and looping devices.
Simultaneously, Kuzme paints and writes across a suspended multi-panel canvas while contact microphones capture the tactile sounds of the process and blend them into the evolving soundscape. Creating a new, portable infrastructure will allow the work to move beyond gallery environments into community settings. By placing experimental art in unexpected environments, the project aims to create moments of surprise and attentiveness that shift how audiences perceive both art and one another.

Sally Ride is a 90-minute opera exploring the life, love, and scientific achievements of Dr. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space and a LGBTQ+ pioneer. With a libretto by Aiden Feltkamp, the work explores Ride’s nearly 30-year relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy while dramatizing her contributions to STEM education and space science. Blending the lyricism of opera with the energy of musical theater, the work offers a joyful, emotionally resonant, and melodically rich experience that expands the cultural conversation about women in science,
LGBTQ+ history, and the power of storytelling through music. The project will include workshops, pre-show talks, and interactive sessions for youth and families, particularly those historically underrepresented in STEM fields, including girls, q***r youth, and youth of color.

From Subway to Subsea is a fiber installation that reimagines a decommissioned subway car as a nascent coral habitat, transforming a symbol of urban transit into a site of ecological renewal. Crocheted entirely from yarn and developed through collaborative studio production, the project translates industrial afterlife into environmental possibility. Inspired by the practice of cleaning and submerging retired train cars to create artificial reefs that support marine biodiversity, the work reframes submersion as an act of collective repair. This collaboration, which brings together neurotypical and neurodiverse artists, members of a synagogue fiber arts club, and local independent artists within a unified framework, invites audiences to reconsider waste and infrastructure as potential sites of renewal.

The Kassandra Project (TKP) is an immersive multidisciplinary performance exploring the silencing of feminine and intuitive wisdom through the myth of Kassandra. The project invites audiences on a guided journey through landscape by vocal and instrumental sound that concludes around a shared fire-circle experience where a transgenerational choir collectively develops a living libretto that explores the consequences of denying unconditioned awareness. Rooted in Chinese Five Element theory, the experience is regulated by an
“organic clock” designed to align the human experience with the natural world. Through community collaboration, somatic practices, Qigong, poetry, and music, TKP transforms personal reflection into collective expression, fostering deeper connection across generations while exploring how communities can heal through listening, creativity, and shared experience.

The People ‘s Jeans Project is a participatory public art project that explores denim as a cultural artifact and a tool for storytelling, identity, and community connection. The project invites community members to contribute worn garments, denim fragments, and personal narratives that reflect their experiences, histories, and relationships with clothing.
Through a series of open studio sessions and public workshops, participants will collaborate in the creation of a large-scale quilted textile installation constructed entirely from reclaimed denim. Participants will be invited to repair, stitch, embellish, or inscribe their stories into the material, transforming everyday garments into a collective artwork. Through this project, denim becomes more than a material; it becomes a canvas through which community voices are stitched together.

Caspar Cendre’s proposed book, The Things We Made in Captivity: Lessons in Art, Survival, and Freedom with Queer/Trans Prisoners (working title), grows out of nearly 20 years of writing, making art, and building community with incarcerated and trans people, and 10 years of A.B.O. Comix as a collaborative publishing project, archive, and lifeline across prison walls.
The book will draw from letters, art publishing files, and personal records to trace the lessons that emerged about chosen family, identity, faith, humor, resistance, boundaries, and what it takes to stay alive inside a system designed to disappear people. This book highlights the creative practices that help people survive another day, and the fragile, stubborn threads of community that endure across distance, cages, and time.

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Like One of the Family: A Puppetry Production is a community-driven, multi-phase puppetry project that adapts selected stories from Alice Childress’s 1950s work into short, performance vignettes. Through story circles, hands-on puppetry workshops and free public performances, the project explores the friendships, humor, resilience, and labor of Black women, making their spoken and unspoken conversations visible through puppetry. It brings together three collaborators: Tanya Nixon-Silberg as lead artist and puppeteer; Ash Winkfield as producer and dramaturg; and Black women in Greater Boston as co-creators. Endorsed by the Childress estate, this is the first adaptation of the stories of Like One of the Family, combining experimental visual storytelling with community collaboration to center Black women’s voices, histories, and imagination in Boston and beyond.

Veronica Santiago Moniello’s performance project, a ma, radio: letters to the body, centers on the figure of the traveler—someone who moves across borders, bodies, and states of change. Through a series of “letters to the body,” it traces how experiences of displacement, survival, and political violence remain stored physically and emotionally.
Drawing from Moniello’s experiences returning to Venezuela during a period of crisis, her project examines surveillance, rupture, and resilience while imagining the body as a form of home.
Moniello aims to gather personal stories from Venezuelans in New York City and build an archive shaped by their voices, memories and offerings. The collected writings will be translated into the sonic dimension of dance,
creating a shared archive of migration and embodied memory.

In a world that often feels black and white, Ombré reminds us that it is not only acceptable but essential to dream in color. Inspired by Jungle’s “Back on 74,” The Wiz’s Emerald City sequence, and the Sinners club dance scene, Ombré weaves six colors, three immersive backdrops, and multiple cultural dance forms into one fluid chromatic journey. The project honors the evolution of Black dance traditions
while celebrating their origins, capturing where we are freest: in our dreams. The final work — a still photography collection and a 4-8-minute visual motion study — creates multiple access points for audiences to engage with themes of identity, freedom, movement, and cultural memory.

My Home is a collaborative portraiture and storytelling project featuring first- and second-generation immigrants. Participants wear outfits that reflect their cultural heritage/roots, paired with personal narratives that honor identity, resilience, and belonging. After the portrait sessions, Hidemi Takagi Bastien conducts interviews with participants to capture personal stories, reflections, and cultural context, ensuring that each portrait is accompanied by the participant’s own voice.
Through these portraits and interviews, she explores how immigrants visually and narratively express themselves in both personal and public spaces. By documenting immigrant experiences and cultural expression through a collaborative process, My Home creates a visual and narrative archive that honors the diverse ways people maintain identity, heritage, and community in challenging social climates.