The Backstage Production is designed to introduce South Side Chicago youth to the fundamentals of theater production while giving them hands-on experience in audio and lighting design, sound engineering, and stage management.

The Design Apprenticeship Program is a design-based mentorship and skills-building initiative that encourages teens and young adults to invest in the improvement of the physical and social conditions of their community. 

The Teen Arts Council (TAC) is a group of student leaders who collaborate with the Arts + Public Life initiative to develop creative skills, leadership experience, and opportunities for their peers to engage with the arts.

The Choreographic Arts Program (CAP) emphasizes the city’s rich dance and cultural heritage. Students will engage in deep research of Chicago’s dance history, explore genres that have shaped the city’s dance and cultural landscape like house, jazz, and hip-hop, and learn from leaders in the field. Students will work collaboratively to create original choreography that reflects personal and community narratives

Teen Arts Council (TAC)

Alycia Kamil is a 24-year-old multi-disciplinary artist, educator, and freedom fighter from the South Side of Chicago who uses the power of words and creative expression to create movements and spark change.

Alycia has been doing on-the-ground community work for the past 9 years, emphasizing the importance of mutual aid efforts and accessible arts/radical education. She is the founder of Undoing Our Erasure. UOE, born in 2020, is a podcast turned workshop series that cultivates the building blocks needed to help us achieve our Black-liberated future, as well as providing a platform to Black voices across the diaspora that are typically silenced.

For the past four years, Alycia has been creating curriculum, facilitating workshops, running seasonal book clubs, hosting free pop-up stores, hosting programming that assists writers in their creative endeavors, and creating mutual aid initiatives working to provide free books and art supplies to Chicago youth ages 12-24.

Aside from her organizing efforts, Alycia has spent the last decade of her life engaging in performing and visual arts. She is a spirited and soul-guided singer, writer, visual artist, jewelry crafter, actor, dancer, or whatever medium calls her. She believes that art is healing justice and a revolutionary practice to engage in. Black liberation is at the root of all her work.

She is the director of "What's My School Worth?", a 2024 project that documents the lasting impacts of the 2013 Chicago Public Schools Closures.

Education Programs Coordinator

Boose (she/her) is a muralist, educator, Ethnic Studies practitioner, and Bruce Lee enthusiast from the Bay Area, California. For over a decade, she has been on the ground and invested in various resistance efforts in Oakland, using art as a vehicle for fostering critical conversations and collective empowerment amongst her students, family, and community. Boose has brought her expertise and practice of radical knowledge sharing from Oakland to Chicago, two historical sites of transformative power building, and is humbled and honored to work with Chicago youth in supporting their creative exploration. 

Design Apprenticeship Program (DAP)

Kal is a multidisciplinary installation artist and cultural worker from Washington, D.C.. After relocating to Chicago, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the University of Chicago in 2026 and continued her work in arts education.

Her practice centers on experimentation with materials such as hair, clay, land, and found objects. Through this material exploration, she gathers techniques, histories, and stories that inform her work in cultural organizing, arts education, and community enrichment. Rooted in practice, play, and growth-based discipline, Kal believes that meaningful radical change within the communities that have nurtured her emerges through intergenerational knowledge exchange, collaboration, and the intentional defining of shared values.

At the core of her work is an urgent desire to experiment with the world around her and to share that same whimsical curiosity with others. She implements support systems designed to expand opportunities for underrepresented Black youth across the diaspora, grounding her artistic practice in care, collective empowerment, and transformative possibility.

Design Apprenticeship Program (DAP)

Josué (he/him) is an artist whose work in sculpture, archiving, and various media explores the realities of being undocumented in the U.S., seeking ways to create safety, home, and legacy for himself and the communities he loves.

Kierah {KIKI} King (they/them) received their BFA in Dance with a minor in Black World Studies from Columbia College Chicago with the class of 2020. A native of Hartford, Connecticut, Kiki was homeschooled in their family’s café where they learned the power of service, education and creativity as central to life.

KIKI’s work in Chicago comes from their passion and commitment for social justice, activism, and community building that present themselves through forms of media, performance, choreographic work and different forms of workshops and events throughout the city of Chicago.

Kiki’s past year in Chicago has included performances and film showings within the greater area; FILM: RAISIN 6018 | North Gallery, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Industry of the Ordinary Gallery.

KIKI’S Performance Credits include: The South Loop Spark as part of the Dance Center Presenting Series Spark Plug Initiative by Bebe Miller & Darrell Jones, FORCE! By Anne Martine at Depaul Museum, The Fly Honey’s at Thalia Hall & The Function by Erin Kilmurry at The MCA Chicago and Mana Contemporary as part of Chicago Dancer Makers Forum; Elevate Festival.

The Back Stage Production Program (BSP)

Educator, artist, and a long time backstage production crew member. Razor (she/her) has worked and toured locally and internationally with concerts, films, plays, cruises, expos, and dance companies. She also mentors youth to get more involved working backstage.