Creative Expressions - Storytelling: Ancestral Roots and Fiber Arts

Thursday, July 16, 2020 - 5-6pm

The SUNY Empire community has a rich and varied artist community. Join us each week to meet our faculty, staff, student, and alumni artists to learn a little about their creative expressions, their process, and them. Our artists hold a Q&A session following their presentations/performances. Creative Expressions happen every Thursday at 5pm in Zoom at this link.

Featured on Thursday, July 16th are presentations by Nicola Marae Allain and Dana Brown. Both Nicola and Dana will share their deep maternal family connections to their artistic expressions.  Nicola will be sharing Tahitian storytelling, and Dana will be talking about her fiber art of crocheting.

Note: If you missed our previous sessions or cannot make it this week, all of the sessions are recorded. Check them out at this link. 

Also, Creative Expressions now has a website that includes all our previous sessions and plans for future sessions.   

Weekly Host: Lisa D’Adamo-Weinstein

This Week’s Presenters:

Nicola Marae Allain, Ph. D. is Dean of the School of the Arts and Humanities, and associate professor in the arts, digital media, and learning and emerging technologies at SUNY Empire State College. Nicola is a former dancer/choreographer specializing in Asia/Pacific traditions. She has a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of Ottawa, Canada, a master's degree in dramatic art with a dance and music emphasis from the University of California, Santa Barbara,  and a Ph. D. in Media and Communication from the European Graduate School in Switzerland.  Born in Great Britain and raised in Tahiti, French Polynesia, she is a former dancer and choreographer specializing in Asia Pacific and Mexican folkloric traditions. Her performances and creative works have been featured at arts, dance, music, cultural and storytelling festivals in the United States and Mexico.  Nicola's creativity is nurtured by the stories from her Polynesian ancestry and rich family history, which she shares in narrative memoir poems. Nicola also translates French poetry and philosophy, and researches Ancient Tahitian history, mythology, performance traditions, and ways of knowing to honor the memory of her ancestors.

Dana Brown is the Interim Director of the Empire Opportunity Program, a mentor, and an instructor of writing and literature at SUNY Empire State College.  Dana is also a professional crochet artist and the owner of Brown Love Art (brownloveart.com).  Creating art has always been a refuge throughout her life - a way to express herself, find peace, and to connect with others.  Keeping the fiber arts tradition alive in her lineage, she has committed to sharing her love of crochet through teaching crochet in her local community.  She has been featured in the News Channel 13 series Women at Work by Elaine Houston, and can be most recently seen featured on the cover of the November 2019 issue of Her Life New York Magazine.