The Educator: Diana Falchuk

Age: 34
Current Neighborhood: Capitol Hill
Karaoke Song: “My Love,” Justin Timberlake
Last Book Read: Living and Loving Out Loud, Cornell West

For Diana Falchuk, arts education is about healthy, working communities.

She first learned about the power of art as an undergrad in Philadelphia, assisting a program that used dance, theatre and painting to address identity and community issues among at-risk students. Falchuk brought that experience with her to Seattle, where she worked at the Children’s Museum and then the Frye before establishing Arts Connect, a partnership between Hilltop Artists and Pierce County Juvenile Court that works with girls released from detention. In addition to cultivating her own artwork (Falchuk was a member of Crawl Space, for example), she drove Arts Connect for the past eight years.

Falchuk recently traveled to New York to speak about criminal justice and the arts at the Clinton Global Initiative, where one of her former students was also invited to sit on the event’s only youth panel. She left the event with a smartphone full of new connections, a lot of new ideas and a level of inspiration that recalled her first Burning Man.

“Plenty of people can bring a good program into existence,” says Andy Fife, executive director of arts nonprofit Shunpike. “Plenty of others can establish a sustainable model for that program to go forward. And there are others who excel at providing leadership voices for advocacy. But it is rare that you find them all in one person.”

In 2012, Falchuk will continue to advocate for arts-based social change through the Seattle Arts Commission while she works toward a Masters of Social Work at the University of Washington, consults on various freelance projects and shows her own recent artwork.

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Photography by Kyle Johnson at Melrose Market Studios.