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Leadership

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Kelly 'Greenlight' Thomas (she/her)

Lead Artist Facilitator

Kelly' Greenlight' Thomas is a Performance Artist, Educator, Wellness Warrior, and Cultural Organizer. For over a decade, Kelly has created performance and facilitated creative spaces around emotional health, women's narratives, and nature. She is the foundress of Black Arts Retreat, an international hub for black creativity, culture, and holistic wellness. Kelly has facilitated groups in Kenya, Brazil, Germany, Haiti, and throughout the US through this work. @blackartsretreat

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Alison Waldman (She/her)

Managing Director

Alison Waldman is a wellness collaborator and movement artist based in Washington, D.C. Alison builds onsite and virtual patient- and provider-facing programs based in dance, mindfulness and community building, and advises healthcare industry leaders on incorporating the arts into the culture of healthcare. As Residence Artist at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, Alison co-developed the Movement for Multiple Sclerosis program with the Department of Neurology (Nightingale Award 2019), directs performances, and leads wellness breaks for staff. Alison was advisor and founding provider for Mili Health, a wellness telehealth platform for cancer patients and is a member of the National Organization of Arts in Health (NOAH)'s Arts for Resilience in Clinicians (ARC) working group.  She delivered her TEDx talk, “Why we should be dancing with our doctors,” in 2020.

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C. Meranda

Flachs-Surmanek (they/them/theirs)

Lead Artist Facilitator

C. Meranda ​is an Ashkenazi Jewish facilitator, worldbuilder, and social artist. C.'s work spans theater-making, cultural organizing, oral history, and healing arts. As an artist, facilitator, and educator, their work roots into radical imagination, storytelling, collective care, and everyday practices of transformative justice. C. values intergenerational collaborations, and is invested in the use of the arts and creative play to incite joy, curiosity, and dialogue. courtneysurmanek.com merandissime.com / @merandissime

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Clare Hammoor

(he/him)

Associate Artistic Director of Performance & Pedagogy

Dr. Clare Hammoor (he/him) is a collaborative theatre-maker and facilitator committed to justice and joy with experience teaching, directing, and devising in universities, public and private schools, professional theaters, and prisons for more than a decade. Clare is fascinated by object-oriented ontologies, playing with things, ritual work, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Clare is the Performance and Pedagogy Consultant for the DU Prison Arts Initiative where he started a series of play-based arts workshops for children and their incarcerated parents. clarehammoor.com

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Tara Rynders (she/her)

Founder, Executive Artistic Director

Tara Rynders is a nurse and dancer, she has been a registered nurse for twenty years and received her Masters in Fine Arts in Dance and Somatic Practices in 2011 from The University of Colorado at Boulder and is an Advanced Certified Grief Recovery Specialist. Rynders is extremely honored to have been named a 2018 A Blade of Grass Fellow, an Arts in Society grantee, a 2019 Colorado Nightingale Luminary, a 2019 Excellence in Nursing Awardee in Compassionate Care, a 2020 Hamilton Awardee from the National Organization of Arts in Hospitals (NOAH) in the category of Arts and Resiliency, the 2021 Mara Mogenson Flaherty Memorial Lectureship from the Oncology Nursing Foundation and most recently was named the 2022 EY Next Wave Leader from the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts.

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