2022-23 National Cohort: Arts Midwest

A. Alanda Gregory is a writer, planner, certified life coach/life mentor, community advocate, and speaker. She is co-owner of Tri-Phoenix Group, LLC (dba Tri-Phoenix Media) and co-founder of Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) Leader & Professional Collective. As a creative professional and community advocate, Gregory considers herself a master networking media maven. She is a self-taught entrepreneur and entertainer open to understanding the needs of the creative professional. Her creative vision is helping other people (as well as herself) to thrive to become better versions of themselves. Gregory incorporates emotional intelligence and life coaching education in her services to enhance client experiences to unlock their own potential and uses her past experience as a corporate professional to create services tailored to others in the art/culture, entertainment, and small business circuit. Gregory’s primary focus is BIPOC-owned businesses and BIPOC professionals; she believes BIPOC citizens are the most underserved and under-appreciated population in the nation. Gregory has a degree in business administration and is a wife and proud mother of two HBCU college graduates and three entrepreneurs with their own brands of catering, styling, and brand merchandise.

Clara Martinez is the dance director at Everett High School in the Lansing School District. A lifelong dancer with a passion for community organizing, Martinez knows that students and community members are the experts—everyone else is in service to them. She is a proud union representative and advocates for students and educators in the Lansing Schools Education Association. Prior to Everett, Martinez served as a teaching artist and as artistic director of Clara Lucia Y Compania, which received the Arts Council of Greater Lansing’s 2016 Community Artist Grant. In 2017, she co-directed Daringly Real Crunchy Moves and premiered the work “love in the time of trump” at Kristi Faulker’s ASSEMBLE Women’s Work Festival. In 2020, Martinez won best dance instructor in Lansing’s City Pulse Top of the Town contest. She is Chair of Michigan Dance Council and serves on the board of directors for All Of The Above Hip Hop Academy and Cultural Advocacy Network of Michigan. She was appointed by Lansing City Council to serve on the City of Lansing Arts & Culture Commission to represent the 1st Ward. In 2021, Martinez was recognized as a rising leader in the arts and selected for the Michigan Arts & Culture Council’s’ Rising Leaders 2021-2022 Cohort program. She is pursuing her master’s degree in social work, (in organization & community leadership) at Michigan State University. Martinez received her bachelor of fine arts degree in dance from The Ohio State University.

Prior to joining Northwestern University as the managing director for the Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts, Jorge Silva served as the managing director for the renowned experimental theater company, The Neo-Futurists, leading the organization through the COVID-19 pandemic utilizing revitalized infrastructure. Prior to working with The Neos, he was the producing coordinator for the Goodman Theatre, serving as the producing liaison for community engagement projects and the curator for artistic programming. Silva is currently a Neubauer civic scholar and MBA candidate at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a 2024 global arts management fellow at the University of Maryland (DeVos Institute). While based in Washington, DC, he was a performing artist and administrator for the Smithsonian Institution’s Discovery Theater and was one of the founding teaching artists for their DCPS in-school arts education program Tools of Discovery. Much of his work, however, is identified with The Neo-Futurists beginning as a 2016 recipient of the artists of color scholarship. Silva is also an artistic affiliate with Teatro Travieso (Wooster, Ohio). Outside of theater, he has worked with the Daniel Murphy Scholarship Fund and The Posse Foundation: Chicago in their respective student mentoring programs. He was also a lecturer and graduate projects advisor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s writing program. Notably, Silva was a featured speaker at Latinos Progresando’s flagship community event, MEX talks (2018) and remains a member of the event’s host committee.

Chelsea Steffes is an emerging arts professional from the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota. Steffes has a bachelor degree in heritage and museum studies and in pre-professional studio art from Concordia College, Moorhead. She has worked at the Plains Art Museum since 2018. Working in the Midwest, Steffes prioritizes inclusion and community building in her work through her many positions at the Plains, whether it be teaching classes as a teaching artist, participating in local community outreach events, or just being a friendly face to welcome anyone who enters. She strongly values making the arts an inclusive environment to foster connection building. As a mixed-race Filipino American in the northern Midwest, Steffes acknowledges the difficulties and nuance in diversity and inclusion. While still learning, she wants to ultimately build a creative and inclusive community for herself and others like her seeking a home in the Midwest.