Creative Individuals

Bob Bierscheid: Bierscheid is a retired director of parks and recreation for the city of Saint Paul. He has held similar positions in Roseville and Marshall. He currently serves on the board of Public Art Saint Paul. He previously served on the board of the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Bierscheid has a BA degree from the University of Iowa and a MS from Temple University. ; Richard Hansen: Hansen is an accomplished arts administrator with extensive experience in film and immersive entertainment. He founded and led multiple arts organizations, including the Northern Film Alliance, Solve Entertainment, and PROVE Collective. Hansen has directed major festivals like the Duluth Superior Film Festival and Sound Unseen, and has a proven track record in grant writing, fundraising, and community building. Hansen excels in tech troubleshooting, event management, digital content production, and social media. His diverse skills and vast professional network make him a dynamic leader in the arts industry.; Leslie Miller: Miller is the author of six collections of poetry, including Y, The Resurrection Trade, and Eat Quite Everything You See from Graywolf Press, and Yesterday Had a Man in It, Ungodliness, and Staying Up For Love from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Miller is a professor of English at the University of St. Thomas; she holds a PhD from the University of Houston (Houston, TX), a MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop (Iowa City, IA), a MA from the University of Missouri (Columbia, MO), and a BA from Stephens College (Columbia, MO).; Sam Mitchell: Aros-Mitchell is an enrolled member of the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians. As an Indigenous art maker and scholar, Aros-Mitchell's work spans the disciplines of performance, sound, light, scenic design, choreography, and embodied writing. Aros-Mitchell holds a PhD in drama and theater from the joint doctoral program at the University of California San Diego/Irvine, a MFA in dance theater from the University of California San Diego, and a BFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sam Aros-Mitchell is a 2023 McKnight Dance Fellow.; Ronald Salazar: Salazar was born and raised in Costa Rica and has called Minnesota home for the last 29 years. For the past fourteen years, he has dedicated himself to working with underrepresented communities, including a significant percentage of Latino and Hispanic families. His current position is the principal of the Birch Grove Elementary School for the Arts in the Osseo school district. Previously, Salazar worked for the Minnesota Transitions Charter School and the Folwell Elementary School for the Performing Arts. Among his many achievements, Salazar is a Bush Leadership Fellow, an undergraduate Fulbright CAMPUS scholarship recipient, and a recipient of the Japan-USA Fulbright Commission's three-week educational trip to Japan.; Lamarr Scott: Scott is the founder and president of Freedom Jazz, Inc, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting and preserving jazz music as the only original American musical art form. For thirteen years, the organization produced a free family oriented jazz festival. Scott is a retired music educator and college dean.; Chitra Vairavan: Vairavan is a Tamil-American artist, seeker, and contemporary Indian dancer and choreographer. Her embodied practice and experimental process are rooted in deep listening, spatial observation, freedoms, poetry, vulnerability, and ancestral memory. She chooses to gesture toward and embody the practice of liberation and decolonization in creative and collaborative choices. Vairavan dances to heal and creates dance to help heal others. Her work earned her the 2015 Sage Award for Outstanding Performer, 2016 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Dance, being named ?25 to Watch? by Dance Magazine in 2017, as well as the 2024 McKnight Choreography Fellowship. Her work has been funded by the Minnesota State Arts Board and the McKnight Foundation. ; Michelle Wingard: Wingard is an installation based photographer, curator, and arts educator. She is a professor of art and gallery director at Bethel University's two exhibition spaces. In her seventeen years of programming exhibitions, Wingard has worked with more than 100 artists in a diverse range of media. In the 2019-20 and 2020-21 program cycles, Wingard was honored to serve as a curatorial mentor for the Emerging Curators Institute (ECI). Her photographic and curatorial projects often seek to create experiential and participatory opportunities exploring memory, grief, memorial, perception, and interconnection themes. She has curated several exhibitions and exhibited her photographic work locally and nationally. She is the recipient of the Jerome Travel Grant (2015) and the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant (2017 and 2019). Wingard holds a MFA in photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York (2006).