Leonie Bell, Theatre Artist
Leonie Bell, is a Brooklyn-based theater artist and educator. She graduated from Bard College with Bachelor in Theater in 2012. Since then, she has been living and acting in New York City. She has performed around New York City, amongst other places at the New Museum, the Invisible Dog in Brooklyn, and the Tank in Times Square. Leonie has been teaching theater and cooking with the non-profit organization Wingspan Arts since 2013. As an artist and educator, Leonie, who was born and raised in in a newly reunified Berlin, Germany, in a German-American household, looks to open dialogue about community, culture, heritage, narrative, and identity, and re-imagine the perceived boundaries of humor, history, and “heimat” or “home.” She has very much enjoyed partaking in the CWP Teaching Artist Training Program, and looks forward to collaborating with the amazing artists and educators she has met along the way.
TATIP Work
“My experience with the TATIP program has been extremely positive. Not only have I met and collaborated with amazing artists such as Shereen Macklin, who is also a full-time theater artist and educator, but I have had the opportunity to watch Pamella Allen and Renee Flagler teach a powerful medley of visual and written arts at the Red Hook Neighborhood School for the past four months. I have learned so much about co-teaching through TATIP. Most importantly, however, TATIP has proved to me that I can be an my artist self wherever I go; being loud and proud about my art, community, and dreams can inspire my students to be loud and proud about their own.”
“Thus far, my most memorable TATIP moment has been the spoken word performance collaborated in during one of our workshop sessions with Shereen Macklin, Tanya Minhas, and Stephanie Jones. Each artist had written a short poem starting with “I was raised by”, which we then sliced up into a new group poem, and performed. Our poem was an amalgamation of four women’s memories melded into one. During this process, our personal narratives became one multi-layered narrative of four women from four wildly different places. This new women’s narrative, ranging from adolescent moments of finding broken crack vials on the street in Queens to passing East German pre-fab apartments at dusk to smelling Mother’s favorite roses from 30 years ago, was powerful because it wasn’t singular. It encompassed one and all at once. For me, this idea of one and all underlines why the arts and education exist in a symbiotic relationship which must be normalized in our society: through this symbiosis, we learn to explore our individuality and celebrate our community and humanity.”
Find out more about Leonie here:
Her work can be seen at www.leoniebell.org.
Check out Leonie’s Lesson Plan that she presented with her TATIP partner, Shereen Macklin.
Interested in TATIP? Find out more about our 2015-16 Program!
See more of our 2014-15 Graduates in the 2015 TATIP Anthology!
