Alana facilitates experiences where everyone is invited to be a creator. She creates spaces and opportunities that make being seen and heard feel joyful and organic.
Electric Forest Festival, which takes place in Rothbury, MI every June, is both a collaboration and an experiment in community. In 2019, Alana facilitated an ongoing interactive mural project at the festival to bring people together and create a visual representation of this community. The collective piece, created over the course of the 4 day event with over 300 people, symbolizes the magic that ensues when we all come together to share our collective voice.
Project collaborators: BlackThorn Productions, Lisa Leturno, Carson Whittaker
In November 2019, Alana activated an event at The Cell Theater in NYC, inviting people to create a doll based on the expression they most wanted to reveal in the coming Winter months. The dolls they created serve both as an artifact and a reminder to remain authentic to this version of themselves.
Concept: Every day, we act as our own designer, presenting a face to the world that reflects how we wish to be seen in different environments. Is this suppression of self- expression or a healthy mode of playful exploration? Is there an identity, a version of ourselves, that we wish could take more of the center stage?
Project Collaborators: The Cell, Mikel Glass
“Together”
At AOHT public high school, Alana piloted a created art therapy in-school program from 2017-2019. AOHT’s students, including many recent arrivals from around the world, come from a variety of cultural backgrounds. In this workshop, students were invited to create a collaborative mural representing the coming together of all of their distinct cultural identities, a community emblematic of the future of our country.
This piece went on to win the Flatbush Avenue Street Banner Art Competition in Spring 2019, which displays the mural as a large-scale banner on Flatbush Avenue, one of Brooklyn’s busiest commercial streets in two separate locations. The banners are currently on display until summer 2020.
Student interview about the project featured on New York Daily News.
Project Collaborators: The Academy of Hospitality and Tourism High School, Katherine Atwill’s 10th grade English class, and Counseling In Schools