A Warm Welcome to our new Director

Alysia Souder has more than sixteen years of experience in arts education, teaching acting and playwriting and has developed residencies that use the arts to teach Conflict/Resolution and Community Building. She is passionate about the role the arts should play in young people's growth and development. Bringing the arts to under-served youth has been central to her work, having done a great deal of work with students from urban communities, students with special needs and with young people in the juvenile justice system. As a teaching artist she has worked for organizations across the state including Playwrights Theatre, Arts Horizons, Arts Genesis and NJPAC.

Alysia served as Playwrights Theatre's Director of Education since 2001 and was responsible for managing the New Jersey Writers Project, Playwrights Theatre's cornerstone program that serves over 150 schools and approximately 15,000 students annually. The Writers Project employs over 85 teaching artist and performers to work in schools and afterschool programs across New Jersey. She developed NJ's Poetry Out Loud Residency Program, a cosponsored project with the NJ State Council on the Arts as part of a national initiative to bring poetry recitation to high schools across the country. Her program has been cited as a national model by the National Endowment for the Arts and is the only Poetry Out Loud culminating event in the nation to be filmed at a television studio (NJN) and featured as a live webcast. She is currently in two new posts, serving as the Director of the Institute of Music for Children and as Playwrights Theatre's Director of Program Development.

She is also an advocate for the creation of a comprehensive system of professional and career development for teaching artists across the state and serves as the Chair of the NJ Arts Education Collective, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to provide the highest quality professional development for members of the arts and education. She recently completed serving as Co-Chair for Charting the Course for the Advancement of Arts Education, a statewide conference held at the Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick and featured a keynote by author, international speaker, and expert on creativity and innovation Sir Ken Robinson. She is also a steering committee member of the Arts Education Partnership Steering Committee whose work includes the NJ Arts Education Census Project. Alysia has been a featured presenter at international conferences including the 6th International Literacy Conference/Guatemala, the 14th International Conference on Learning/ Johannesburg and the 15th European Conference on Reading/Germany. Alysia is also a playwright and director with five original productions to her credit. Her latest play FLAT BLACK was featured in Passage Theatre's Soloflights Festival in March 08. Most recently Alysia was named Outstanding Arts Educator of the Year by the Arts Council of the Morris Area and was recognized at the 20th annual Celebrate the Arts event in May 2008.

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Alysia Souder, Director