Additional Cohorts

Brianna Lynn Hernández Baurichter is a Chicana artist, curator, and educator guided by socially-engaged practices. Her background includes experience working in community organizations, gallery, museum, and higher education settings, and as a consultant with public health researchers. In developing as an artist and creative professional Brianna credits her late mother, Sylvia D. Hernández, as her most significant mentor and inspiration for the creativity, resilience, and compassion she demonstrated throughout her life. Brianna’s creative practice and world-view is also influenced by her mixed heritage from Mexican and German parents, embodying the spirit of a hybrid, eager to form connections and build new realities. 

In the studio, Brianna creates installations through several mediums including large-scale charcoal drawings, video art, sculpture, and performances, each incorporating a high level of physicality and movement to reveal knowledge held within the body. Brianna’s current body of work focuses on the experience of providing end-of-life care and subsequent grieving process. In addition to formal artworks, this body of work offers workshops and takeaway resources for viewers to self-educate through the safety of the creative process. 

As a curator, Brianna works with artists to make socially-charged topics publicly accessible in order to create opportunities for education and empathy. This focus on empathy building is also embedded into her education philosophy whether in the classroom, workshops, or as a consultant, enabling deeper connections to the purpose and potential of the content. As an extension of this socially-conscious approach, Brianna frequently collaborates with community health researchers to incorporate the arts into collection and dissemination of public health project data. 

Brianna is currently the Director of Cultural Transformation at the Milwaukee Artist Resource Network, where she is developing policy and community engagement initiatives to address equity and inclusion in the Greater Milwaukee Area arts community. 

Cohort Project:  My project seeks to empower family and professional caregivers and reduce stress during caregiving.  Caregivers and the vital tools they use are presented as sacred through gilding care objects and portrait photography.  Utilies Curativos treats common caregiver tools as sacred and holy objects in order to reconsider their value within the difficult circumstances they are used.  This treatment is done through gilding medical equipment with silver, gold and copper leaf.  Instead of unwanted medical waste, they become precious healing tools to help us better care for those we love.  The elevation of these tools also reflects on the caregiver, reminding them of their own sacredness in this role. 

Dianne Choie is the Youth & Family Programs Coordinator at the Milwaukee Art Museum. She has worked as an educator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Chinese in America in New York City, and she has worked as an associate third grade teacher at Ethical Culture Fieldston School. Dianne is a graduate of Dartmouth College and has a Master of Science in Museum Education from Bank Street College. She lives in Milwaukee with three mildly disobedient cats. 

Cohort Project:  Children feel connected to seeing and making art with an emphasis on supporting their grieving, uncertainty and other aspects of their social and emotional learning that have been affected by the pandemic.

Erika has a Bachelor’s in Art and Graphic Design and a Master’s in Art History and Museum Studies. She has over eight years of program and event development experience in non-profit arts and academic medicine that includes planning, organizing, interpreting, and presenting exhibitions, conferences, and lectures. Currently, she is a Community Program Coordinator with the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) for the Office of Community Engagement. Included as one of MCW’s four primary missions, community engagement seeks to help address health disparities within our city and beyond through a shared purpose with community partners. 

Cohort Project: Creating a program that helps connect local arts organizations working in public health to academic researchers at Medical College of Wisconsin interested in arts interventions.  We will bridge to facilitate conversations or help navigate introductions for possible partnerships. 

Jenny Toutant is the Chief Engagement and Education Officer at Milwaukee Repertory Theater starting her tenure there in the 2005/06 season as the Education Assistant moving into the Director of Education role a few short months later. After 15 years in this role, she also assumed the leadership of the community engagement department. As the leader of the education and engagement programs for Milwaukee Rep, she designs programming for all ages. This includes supporting resident-led neighborhood initiatives, community conversations, and cultivating community partnerships. Rep Education programs serve over 20,000 students each year with student matinee programming, in-school arts-integrated residencies, student driven teen programming, and adult training. Jenny is actively engaged in co-leading nationwide conversations to further fieldwide best practices and engagement. She has also taught for UW-Milwaukee, UW-Parkside, Virginia Commonwealth University, First Stage Children’s Theater, and School of Performing Arts in the Richmond Community. She is published in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Theatre Symposium. 

Cohort Project:   

Our desired result is to use our work to deepen the connectivity and impact in Amani, Metcalfe Park and Muskego Way in service to their neighborhood revitalization goals.  In Amani, we want to increase residents skills in advocacy and securing resources related to family well-being and life-long learning; In Metcalfe Park, we want to strengthen neighborhood identity and connect residents across cultures and geography, and in Muskego Way we want to strengthen schools in and serving the neighborhood. 

Johanna de los Santos has been the Executive Director of Art Start since July of 2007. Prior to joining the Art Start family, she spent years as Social Impact Director for two major motion picture film releases, Favela Rising (2005) and The Hip Hop Project (2007), taking conscious, independent film on nationwide tours through marginalized communities, transitional housing residences, and detention facilities as a part of their distributor’s traditional release campaign.  From 2003-2005, Johanna served as Manager of Community Partnerships for the New York International Latino Film Festival and holds three years of corporate business planning expertise from the multinational Briggs & Stratton Corporation. 

Johanna received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1998) and a M.A. from New York University in Latin American Studies (2007) where she focused on art and music as a social movement under dictatorships and other systems of oppression.  In 2010, she was awarded “Non-Profiteer of the Year” by the New York Association of Non-Profit Professionals.  Since 2015, Johanna has split her time between NYC and the Midwest as she leads the organization’s expansion of its Public Exchanges Program and key strategic partnerships throughout the U.S. 

Cohort Project:  I hope to create and pilot an intervention for youth and young adults from historically marginalized communities to gain access to free, quality, mental health support services in creative, non-clinical spaces with both licensed mental health providers and artists that understand the importance of strength and asset-based work with marginalized youth and the sacredness of the individual creative spirit in pursuit of liberation. 

Mark leads a devoted team of education and professionals at Islands of Brilliance, an early workforce development program for youth and young adults on the autism spectrum. Students are matched 1 : 1 with design and tech professionals, allowing them to showcase their creative thinking, learn professional design software, and develop critical social communication skills. COVID-19 necessitated a pivot to a distance learning platform, which resulted in unprecedented growth for the organization. Islands of Brilliance now has students from around the United States enrolled in all three layers of programming access. The inspiration for the program originates with his youngest son Harry, who was diagnosed on the autism spectrum just before the age of three. His TEDx talk 13 Years on an Island traces the personal story behind the creation of Islands of Brilliance. 

Prior to Islands of Brilliance, a 27 year career in advertising, design, and digital saw Mark working for notable creative boutiques in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Chicago. During this period his work appeared in The One Show, Communication Arts, Graphis, and The Obies, while also receiving acclaim in Adweek, Creativity and The New York Times. He was a member of the Creative Alliance, a cohort of notable agency creatives and agencies working on social impact initiatives during the final two years of the Obama Administration. 

Mark also currently serves as the Social Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Lubar Entrepreneurship Center, devoting time to working with undergraduate students on design methodologies, business model canvas, and thinking through prototypes of their ideas focused on social innovation. 

Cohort Project:  Aligned with the Autism Society’s Quality of Life Outcomes, Islands of Brilliance will conduct “Sandbox Programming” that provides safe, supportive and collaborative environments for children to learn, create and connect. 

Megan McGee of the house McBedalov, the first of her name on yahoo.com, Executive Director and co-founder of Ex Fabula, Gen Xer, Master of Arts in Spanish Literature, follower of Ella Baker, fosterer of Brave Spaces, breaker of silence and stigma, and mother of three-year-old Olivia. 

Cohort Project:  We cultivate “Brave Spaces” where community members discover, craft and share their personal stories and reflect on the stories of others.  This aligns with the City of Milwaukee’s 414Elevate Health Plan that seeks to enhance community connectedness, strengthen and enhance neighborhood and civic leadership, and overall positive mental health. 

Sam Goodrich oversees various TimeSlips projects such as Tele-Stories, connecting artists with under-connected elders via phone, and Stage Right, a project in which seniors with dementia create and perform in their own original musicals. With a performance background and a personal connection to working with those with memory loss, Goodrich hopes to bring light to the benefits that creativity can have on a person with memory loss, as well as the relief it can bring to loved ones and care partners. 

Cohort Project:  Our project Tele-Stories, seeks a reduction in loneliness and social isolation in underconnected elders through inviting elders into creative and engaging conversations from the comfort of their own homes.