YBCA YOUNG ARTISTS AT WORK

From 2011 to 2014, Laurel was the Youth Arts Manager and Education/Engagement Specialist at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. She coordinated and supervised the Young Artists at Work paid, multidisciplinary art-as-activism program for high school teens, developing and implementing a rigorous year-long art-as-social-justice curriculum in conjunction with YBCA's curatorial vision and teaching weekly classes in contemporary performance practices, critical aesthetic theory, and community activism.  
​During her tenure as Program Manager, Laurel:

• Presented twice at the National Teens In the Arts Convening at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston
• Was awarded Innovation Grants from EMCArts and the Center for Cultural Innovation Next Gen Arts Program
• Received two certificates of recognition from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for contributions to the SF Youth Arts Summit
• Piloted the Community-Based Project model, wherein 25 Young Artists collaborated with CBOs to create original works of activist art
• Produced the first-ever YBCA Teen Nite featuring work by YBCA Young Artists in the YBCA Galleries and Screening Room
• Fundraised over $18,000 for the construction of the new YBCA Young Artists at Work Media Laboratory
• Created and implemented the Envisioning an Abolitionist Future curriculum, a year-long artistic interrogation of mass incarceration in America, culminating in the sold-out performance of Truth be Told, a performance piece collaboratively created by the YAAWs & the incarcerated men of the Resolve to Stop the Violence program.

​​​Laurel's article about the YAAW program, Something Larger than Ourselves: Redefining the Young Artists at Work Program as an Art-as-Activism Residency for Teens ​was published in the Fall 2014 issue of the Journal of Museum Education. 

journal of museum education article

visions of an abolitionist future

ARTIVISM AS POWER
A presentation about the Young Artists At Work Community-Based Project Model 
Allied Media Conference Transformative Arts Practice Space
Detroit MI, June 2013.

TRUTH BE TOLD
Collaboratively created by the men of the Resolve to Stop the Violence program at San Francisco Jail #5 and the YBCA Young Artists at Work
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum Theater
San Francisco CA, April 2014

URBANIAN
Devised and performed by the YBCA Young Artists at Work
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
San Francisco CA, 2012

NO PHONE
A performance workshop devised by Laurel for the YBCA Young Artist's at Work 50 Cent Tabernacle program
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater
January, 2014