Laurel is an educator, facilitator, performing artist, and arts education & social justice consultant based in Los Angeles, CA. She teaches on the faculty of the Arts Education Program in the Department of Art and Art History at Loyola Marymount University, where she is also a Doctoral student in Educational Leadership for Social Justice (Ed.D). Her consulting clients include the CalArts Community Arts Partnership, for whom she develops trainings in culturally-responsive and trauma-informed pedagogy; the New Mexico Arts & Justice Network, for whom she compiles research and resources for arts providers working with systems-impacted community members; GROUND SERIES Dance Collective, for whom she facilitates mission/vision and goal-setting processes focused on anti-racist praxis in the performing arts; and iLEAD Charter Schools, for whom she leads a performing arts program for pregnant and parenting teens. She is the host of the online talk show Creative Teaching, the artistic director of PostMan and Sharon is Karen, a longtime member of the Royal Frog Ballet performance collective, and the Director of Youth Programming for Everyday Arts,
Over the course of her career in arts education, Laurel has served as the Lead Arts Education Specialist and Social-Emotional Learning curriculum author for the Los Angeles County Office of Education's Technology Enhanced Arts Learning (TEAL) and Teaching English Language through the Arts (TELA) programs; Youth Development and Leadership Specialist for the Arts for Incarcerated Youth Network; Manager/Producer of the AIYN Young Artivists Lab at Inner-City Arts; Associate Director and Professional Development Coordinator of the UCLA Visual and Performing Arts Education Program; Faculty Lecturer in the World Arts and Cultures/Dance Department of the UCLA School of Art and Architecture; Youth Arts Manager and Education/Engagement Specialist at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Adjunct Professor in the Performing Arts and Social Justice Department at the University of San Francisco; Dance Teacher at St. James Episcopal School; Social Justice and Service Learning Instructor at Windward School; Multi-Arts Theater Director for the Idyllwild Arts Academy; Executive Director of Theatre-in-the-Making; and an educator for numerous organizations including Enchanted Circle Theater, Working Classroom, the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles Department of Arts and Culture, and the Women’s Center for Creative Work.
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Laurel’s performance work has premiered at REDCAT NOW, the International Home Theater Festival, the Revolutions International Theater Festival, CounterPULSE, Pieter Space, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Women's Center for Creative Work. She produced the national tour of her show September (created with her husband, Ewen Wright) in 2014, and the West Coast tour of her recent project, PostMan, in 2019. She was also the lead singer of Lady Stardust (SF: 2012 - 2016) and Cassandra (LA: 2015 - 2017). Laurel is a proud recipient of the 21st Century Fox Social Impact award, the Creative Capacity Fund Next Gen award, and an Arts for LA ACTIVATE Fellowship for her leadership in arts advocacy; she is also a two-time California Arts Council grantee, including a 2018 Re-Entry Through the Arts grant to support the Act Two Performance Project for formerly incarcerated and systems-impacted youth.
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A devoted decarceration advocate, Laurel has facilitated collaborative creative partnerships between incarcerated and non-incarcerated students in jails and detention centers across the country, including: the UCLA Prison Education Program and Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall; The Unusual Suspects Theater Company and David Gonzales Probation Camp; Stanford University & Hillcrest Juvenile Detention Facility; the University of San Francisco & San Francisco Jail #5; Keshet Dance Company & the New Mexico Youth Diagnostic & Development Center (which received President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities Coming Up Taller Award for Cultural Excellence in 2009); and the National Hispanic Cultural Center & Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center, for which the performance Lucid Dreaming was presented as part of the 2011 Revolutions International Theater Festival.
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Laurel has presented at the Allied Media Conference, the Create Justice Conference, the Arts in Corrections Conference, Beyond the Bars LA, and the National Convening for Teens in the Arts, and been published in several journals and online publications including Theater Topics, the Journal of Museum Education, the National Teens-in-the-Arts Report, Getting Smart, Voyage LA, The Huffington Post, and her own online periodical PostMan: The Newsletter. Laurel received her M.A. in Theater Education and Community Outreach from the University of New Mexico in 2010. She lives with her husband, Ewen, and their dog, Oliver, in Echo Park. Instagram: @estrellaurel
