story collectors
with Mi'Jan Celie and Adam Horowitz
september 8 - 10th



Workshop starts promptly at 3:00 PM on Friday, September 8 and ends at
1:00 PM on Sunday September 10.
$522 for weekend, $470 if you register before August 18.
Organic meals included.
Some onsite lodging available, and free tenting.

We know that data alone cannot change policy, create empathy, or spark imagination about what might be. But stories can! As humans, we are hard-wired for story—a fact that we can harness in our efforts to build community and create positive change.
In this workshop we will practice skills for building civic engagement and community through storytelling and storygathering. We will learn how storytelling can be a powerful cultural organizing tool, a means of surfacing deeply held truths and tensions, and a call to action.
Throughout our weekend, we will practice deep listening, get to know each other, and enjoy the magic of the Story Circle. We will leave not only knowing how to tell our own stories in a way that galvanizes others, but also with new practices and methodologies for storytelling and gathering that we can put to use in our communities to spark collective action.
Mi'Jan Celie Tho-Biaz is a Documentarian-In-Residence with the Institute of American Indian Arts' Essential Studies Department, and founding convener for the 2017 Black and Indigenous Summit for Social Movement Documentarians, to be hosted at Omega Institute. Mi'Jan Celie previously was a Visiting Scholar with the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics at Columbia University, an inaugural leadership participant with The Banff Centre's New Fundamentals in Creative Ecology and the Aspen Institute’s Franklin Project, and Steinem Initiative lead designer and facilitator for the 2016 public policy digital storytelling and documentation pilot project with women organizers laboring for reproductive justice, at Smith College. Mi'Jan Celie's deepest passions are writing, gathering, amplifying and uncovering healing narratives of personal transformation and community social change.

Adam Horowitz is Chief Instigator of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC), a grassroots action network inciting creativity and social imagination to shape a culture of empathy, equity, and belonging. An artist, organizer, and "projectician," Adam has worked with numerous organizations at the intersection of arts, education, and social change—Ashoka, Bowery Poetry Club, The Future Project, among others—and traveled internationally as a performer, musician, and researcher of intercultural barter. Adam was a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia and a 2015 Artist in Residence with the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU.