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SARA HALEY
I SUPPORT LEARNERS BY
> Deeply listening to reflect pre-existing creative skills, strengths, themes, and practices
> Aligning goals to actionable external tasks, benchmarks, and timetables
> Connecting students to relevant art opportunities and resources like regional contests, funding, institutions, and programs
> Providing hands-on art instruction from drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, video, installation, performance
> Facilitating the writing process for artist's statements, captions, and grant applications that sing
> Introducing real-world art skills like documentation, research, deepening concepts, verbal expression
> Installing transferrable professional skills via office suite, digital art tools, project development, data+time management practices
EXPERIENCE DETAILS
EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS MANAGER, O, Miami
Miami is a poem we write together
- O, Miami
In my role with O, Miami, I had the pleasure to contribute to a mighty team of some of the most creative, capable, dynamic, and genuinely community-minded individuals I know doing the funnest (not a word), coolest, most impactful work I could imagine. We hosted an annual 30 day nomadic poetry festival, national teacher summits, countywide in-school programming, free and low cost public programming, published books, audiobooks, "civic publishing" projects that placing Miamians' words for encounter in public spaces....
The people on that team were and will forever continue to be inspirations for how I want to move and be moved by my city.
Photos by Chantal Lawrie
TEACHERS' RESOURCE VIDEO, O, Miami
I also taught, developed curriculum, and helped produced teaching media resources for O, Miami. This video is a part of The Greenhouse Teachers’ Lab, a series of training videos aimed at providing teachers with creative writing strategies supported by a trauma-informed lens. Each video is presented by a teaching artist and a licensed art therapist and provides teachers with an executable lesson plan.
For most of this series, I was supporting behind the scenes production. This episode, however, I had the opportunity to hop to the other side of the camera to present with Art Therapist Elia Khalaf. Our lesson is designed to promote a growth mindset by providing students with regular opportunities to interact with diverse information, create freely across forms, and receive feedback that highlights a range of strengths.
TEACHERS' RESOURCE VIDEO
COMMUNITY ART CENTER, Tropotrope: Arts Learning Lab
In 2021-2023 with the loving support of colleagues, family, and friends, I built out, founded, and directed a community arts center in Little Haiti. The warehouse provided 24-hour studio space for local artists, private meeting rooms for tutors and arts therapists, classrooms for teachers, programming space for facilitators, a full schedule of for profit, sliding scale, donation-based interdisciplinary art education experiences for learners of all ages. We meaningfully collaborated with over 170 individuals and org contributors in 3 years.
This project crystalized for me the power of trying something ambitious in public. The scope necessitated that I ask for help, let others in, release perfectionism, and trust. I wouldn't trade these lessons for anything.
Commuity Art Center
All of the best photos from this set are almost certainly by Aminta Paiz pictured grinning on the phone in the yellow in this first slide
STATE TEACHING AWARD, Magnet Program @ South Miami K-8
I was bestowed this great honor during my time teaching for the South Miami K-8 Center middle school magnet program. These were such special years- my first time lead teaching, building a classroom, finding my voice as a leader. I had the opportunity to connect with students in long block schedule hours through their whole middle school trajectories, so the depth of reciprocal learning between us was profound. Students and I co-created a supportive community in which they and I could play, try things out, succeed, fail, make messes, laugh, and reflect together.
During this time I also had the delight of working alongside the ever cool calm, hilarious digital art teacher, Xonia Regalado. The program itself was founded by the beloved art teacher, Marilyn Traeger. I moved to Miami for this position, at the suggestion of my high school art teacher and forever colleague, mentor, and friend Jenny Gifford. These three Miami art education legends are the reason I am who and how I am. Period.
State Teaching Award
STUDENT FILM FEATURED IN NATIONAL FILM FEST
Same students at South Miami K-8 Center, first collaboration with O, Miami way back in 2018.
For this project, Exchange for Change and O, Miami's appointed Prison Poet Laureate, Eduardo "Echo" Martinez, wrote a poem on the theme of "middle school" specifically for the students. Through the duration of National Poetry Month, students worked and played with interpretation across mediums to attempt to unpack Martinez's layered expressions of systematic injustices common to both the public school and prison systems. The students' experiences culminated in the creation of a collaborative multimedia animation entitled Substitute Students. The film was picked up by the Indie Grits Film Festival.
This was one of my first times taking on such a complex charged subject with adolescents for a project that connected students with collaborators and audiences way beyond the school.
Some takeaways were:
(1) young people can handle way more than one might be in the habit of expecting
(2) I've got to make it my mission to expand the "classroom"
Student Film
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