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Corridor Team Leadership  

Our Neighborhood Engagement Officers (NEO)

 

The NEOs are representative of the larger community, as well as the voice and support to the students. They work with the Project Director to develop Creative Placemaking curriculum, and to identify areas and themes in the neighborhoods that are relevant and important to the residents. 

 

 

East: Annette Daniels-Taylor

 

A native New Yorker born in the forgotten borough of Staten Island, Annette is an award winning playwright, theater artist and performance poet, she loves voices and sound. Admitting to take time to lose herself in the varied patterns, meter and tone of the many-layered musicality of the universe. As a writer she creates pieces that carry her testimony of the images heard in the worlds she inhabits. 

 

Having worked with HBO’s Def Comedy Jam, MTV Networks, Apollo Theater, Black Entertainment Television, Radio City Music Hall, La Mama, Nuyorican Poets Café, Queen Latifah, Lenny Kravitz, Conan O'Brien, Russell Simmons, Kathleen Battle, among others, including the late great Ruby Dee, has given Annette many experiences to learn and create within the entertainment industry.

 

Her playwright credits include A Little Bit of Paradise, A Symphony Down In My Soul, Boat Leaving in Ten Minutes, 3 Women, Mama Songs, Ruby ’67, Nancy Goes to Seneca Falls, and Write Out of Here.

 

Annette is a member of ASCAP, The Dramatists Guild, and the Association of Teaching Artist, a former writer-in-residence at The Langston Hughes Arts & Cultural Institute, and a Board member of Squeaky Wheels, and Against The Grain Theater Festival.
 

 

West: Barrett Gordon

 

Repatriated Buffalo collage artist, librarian, organizer, and programming coordinator at The WASH Project (arts and resources based mini community center and creative placemaking success story housed within Burmese refugee owned laundromat in Buffalo's West Side), Barrett specializes in visual literacy; co-founder of several integral WASH partnerships and programs, including the city-wide rollerskating family and party unit, the Well Rounded People's Party, Barrett is an enthused and creative community builder.

 

He earned his B.A. in English from U.B. in 2002 and his Masters in Library and Information Science from Dominican University (Chicago, IL) in 2010, and has practiced and exhibited art and music in several American cities.

 

 

Project Director, Marissa Lehner

 

Buffalo born and raised Artist and Educator, who returned home after receiving her BFA from Alfred University. In 2010, Lehner and a small group of local artists founded Emerging Leaders of the Arts, Buffalo (ELAB). ELAB is a non-for profit group of creative individuals whose mission is to build upon Buffalo’s potential as an emerging arts hub in the Midwest by providing opportunities for artists while revitalizing Buffalo itself. Over the past four years, she has acted as the Community Arts Chair of ELAB. Her first project was to coordinate and design a large-scale community mural in the Black Rock. ELAB’s most recent event. City of Night, brings together a range of artistic disciplines in the collection of grain elevators known as Silo City. Lehner has curated and coordinated the site-specific artworks for the past three years. ELAB has since been awarded a Robert Rauschenberg grant to assist in this innovative arts programming.

 

She has been recognized as an emerging artist in her own right, creating mixed-media interactive sculpture and large scale installations and exhibiting in a range of galleries and unique places such as city streets, empty store fronts, subway stations, Silo City and the Central Library. Her work has been exhibited in Buffalo, and Lawrence, Massachusetts, and published in the Buffalo News, ArtVoice, Buffalo Rising, Spark Magazine and various show catalogues. She was awarded a commissioned installation for the 2013 echo: Art Fair, and an installation accepted into the UB Yoko Ono Fan Club exhibition in spring 2014.

 

Professionally, she worked for three years at Clarence Middle School teaching adaptive and 8th grade Art. She is now in her second year of grad school, working towards her Masters of Science in Art Education at Nazareth College of Rochester. 

 

 

Young Audiences of Western New York
Cynnie Gaasch, Executive Director 

 

Cynnie has been the Executive Director of Young Audiences WNY since 2009, where she provides strategic management for a growing cultural organization that serves the eight counties of Western New York. A graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA and a recipient of an MFA from American University in Washington, DC. Cynnie is an active visual artist, and has been a teaching artist, professor, fundraiser, curator, and art critic.

 

As an art critic she translated the visual arts for a general audience in her role as arts editor for Artvoice and then contributing critic for the Buffalo News. As a grant-writing consultant, Gaasch’s clients included American Institute of Architects Buffalo/WNY Chapter, Buffalo First, Buffalo ReUse, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and Somali Bantu Organization.

 

In April 2013, Ms. Gaasch was elected Chair of the Young Audiences National’s Executive Directors Council, a network of 30 affiliates across the country. In 2013 she participated in the National Guild for Community Arts Education’s Community Arts Education Leadership Institute. She completed the Harvard Business School Strategic Perspective in Nonprofit Management program in 2011, and received the Future Leaders in the Arts fellowship from National Arts Strategies in 2009. Gaasch was a recipient of Buffalo Business First’s Forty Under 40 Award in 2008.