Youth Poetry Slam event featuring 12 winners of Piano Slam - hosted by youth advocate Octavia Yearwood, featuring social justice poet, Andrea Assaf, with program elements curated by YA Author Pablo Cartaya and Piano Slam Founder Carlene Sawyer. Saxophonist Gregory LeDon will provide the musical inspiration for our poets. Event is May 27 at 4 PM at The Betsy Hotel.
Andrea Assaf is a writer, performer, director and cultural organizer. She’s the founding Artistic Director of Art2Action Inc., and the National Coordinator of the Institute for Directing & Ensemble Creation (an Art2Action collaboration with Pangea World Theater). Through the Building Bridges program, she is currently Artist-in-Residence and guest faculty at the School of Theatre & Dance, University of South Florida (Tampa). Andrea has served as a consultant with the Arts & Democracy Project, Alternate ROOTS, and more. She is a former Artistic Director of New WORLD Theater (2004-09), and former Program Associate for Animating Democracy (2001-04). Andrea has a Masters degree in Performance Studies and a BFA in acting, both from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She currently serves on the Board of CAATA (Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists), Alternate ROOTS, and the International Management Committee of WPI (Women Playwrights International, 2012-15), and is a member of RAWI (Radius of Arab American Writers).
Octavia Yearwood is an arts educator, motivational speaker, choreographer, and an overall entrepreneur from New York City. She relocated to Miami in 2012 to expand her arts services company, Team Ohhh. Through Team Ohhh she provides dance and visual art enrichment programming in public schools, private schools and dance studio’s around the world. She has been an educator for the last 15 years, using the arts to bridge the gap between community and academia. She recently became Program Director for South Florida Cares Mentoring Movement where she has been able to work and build relationships with notable arts, education and community organizations like the Perez Art Museum, ICA Miami, URGENT Inc, University of Miami, Rush Philanthropic and local artist to bring transformational experience to the youth of Miami-Dade and Broward County. From curating exhibitions that commission local artist to bring fine arts to the city of Miami Gardens or collaborating with those artists to bring free arts programing to the children of Overtown, Octavia moves forward in using the arts to fortify our youth. In 2016 Octavia received the American Express Emerging Leaders Award and was honored by Legacy Magazine as one of Miami’s 40 Black Leaders Under 40. She continues to inspire and build the youth using the arts and collaborations.
The mission of Piano Slam is to utilize music as a tool and inspiration to give our youth a voice through artistic expression. Piano Slam is a poetry writing competition that asks students to compose works of poetry inspired by their reactions to a selection of music, and, if they become a finalist, to perform their composition at the annual Piano Slam event at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.