Mariah Rankine-Landers, EdM

Executive Director, co-founder

Mariah (she/her) is sought out for her ability to design responsive curriculum centered in creative inquiry. She’s a coach to educators at large to interrupt master narratives in favor of a systems whose outcomes are justice.

Mariah’s work promotes and invites the educational system to redesign its purposes with the role of the contemporary artists at the forefront of how young people can develop the capacity for imagination, innovation, perception, and critical thought that will bridge and build a society that we all deserve. Mariah leads with conviction that if you tend to your heart, tend to the art that motivates you, and lead with love, that our schools can dissolve the oppressive systems they uphold and become the sanctuaries we all need to fully bloom and become. She was particularly motivated to co-found Studio Pathways after co-creating Rise Up! An American Curriculum inspired by the musical “Hamilton, An American Musical,” to transform teaching and learning through creative inquiry. Mariah is the former director of the Integrated Learning Specialist Program and the School Transformation Through the Arts grant at Alameda County Office of Education. She is co-founder of Canerow Kids and a founding board member of Chapter 510. She is a former classroom teacher with 20 years of service dedicated to improving the landscape of learning for our children.

Jessa Brie-Moreno, MFA

co-founder in residence

Jessa (she/her) uses compassionate inquiry to unlock creativity, shift power disparities, and embody multiple narratives for a better world. Jessa has been a professional theatre artist, facilitator and arts educator for over twenty years, which serves as her template for healthy collectivism in action. She recently served as Local Advocacy Field Manager for the California Alliance for Arts Education, is ongoing Adjunct Faculty with the California Institute for Integral Studies and San Jose State University, and is a founding member of White Educators for Racial Justice, a study group for decentering whiteness and disrupting bias in the classroom. As former Co-Director of School Transformation Through the Arts and the Integrated Learning Specialist Program out of the Alameda County Office of Education, she had the pleasure of midwifing educators and leaders through whole-school mindset shifts.

A Bay Area resident since 1997, she has directed and acted with over a dozen local professional theater companies, winning awards and honors. She served as Dept. Chair of the Oakland Tech Performing Arts Program and as Founding Director of both the award-winning student theatre company OakTechRep and the Oakland Theatre Arts Initiative. She is a graduate of Scuola Internazionale dell'Attore Comico in Italy and holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Creative Inquiry and an English Language Arts Teaching Credential. She wrestles actively with complex lineage as a sixth-generation settler colonist to California, fourth generation artist, third generation activist, & mother and godmother to many powerful young women.

Maya Kosover

Facilitator

Maya Kosover (she/they) is a community facilitator, artist, and educator based in Chicago. I am committed to the arts as our bridge back to ourselves and each other through accessing authentic expression, connection, truth, repair, joy, play, and healing. 

My personal orientation for understanding what we’re up against is situated in a healing justice framework. Racism, capitalism, patriarchy, ableism, homophobia and the others succeed when we are disembodied, disconnected, and disillusioned. The art I create and the spaces I facilitate invite us into healing by practicing the opposite: embodiment, connection, and radical imagination. My dream is for every human to be tapped into and resourced by their innate creativity. I’m fascinated by our collective imagination and constantly gravitate toward what has yet to be created.

I am currently the Artistic Director at the Jewish Museum of Chicago, a museum crafting accessible, multigenerational entry points to diasporic community building, organizing, and cultural art practices. I am a Jewish Studio Project Facilitator, a facilitation framework with roots in art therapy designed to cultivate creativity as a spiritual practice for social transformation. I am also a facilitator at Studio Pathways, an organization committed to educator and school leader development through inquiry, arts-integration, and culturally responsive teaching & learning. After teaching multi-media journalism and media studies at the public high school level for six years, I now facilitate art workshops for youth, teens and adults. Some orgs I’ve worked with include: Olive Tree Arts Network, Urban Gateways, Marwen, Institute for Jewish Spirituality, JCUA, If Not Now, Richmond Art Center, RYSE, and Teen Talk App.

A’aron Heard

Facilitator

Aáron Heard (she/they) is a Queer, Black creative problem solver and self proclaimed peace being committed to our collective liberation through the intersection of art, healing, and education. Rooted in love and community, Aáron is grounded in purpose, leads with enthusiasm, questions with a critical curiosity, and prioritizes learning, reflection and growth. Aáron's art practice includes poetry, painting, sacred sound, documentary film, and anything she finds interesting in the moment. Aáron most recently served as the Director of Learning for Maker Ed, a national education non-profit; she has taught middle school humanities and facilitated countless learning experiences for adult learners since 2014.  

Gabriel Cortez

Facilitator

Gabriel Cortez is a poet, educator, and organizer based in the Bay Area, California. His work has appeared in Poem-A-Day by The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Rumpus, The Breakbeat Poets Anthology Volume 4, and elsewhere. A VONA, Poetry Incubator, and #BARS workshop alum, he has received awards from the Rainin Foundation, the National Performance Network, the University of California, Palette Poetry, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Gabriel is the inaugural poet in residence at The Ecology Center and Shelterwood Collective, where he uses poetry and arts education to uplift local legacies of resistance rooted in environmental justice and food and land sovereignty. He is a member of the artist collective, Ghostlines, and co-founder of The Root Slam, an award-winning poetry venue dedicated to inclusivity, justice, and artistic growth, as well as Write Home, a project working to challenge public perceptions of houselessness and shift critical resources to houseless Bay Area youth through poetry and arts programming. Gabriel has served on the board of directors of Performing Arts Workshop and The Bay Area Book Festival. From 2014 to 2023, he was Lead Poet Mentor and Director of Programs at Youth Speaks. Gabriel is of Black, white, and Panamanian descent. His work explores power, identity, belonging, and gold teeth. For more, visit GabrielMCortez.com.

Diane Friedlaender, PhD.

Facilitator

Diane (she/her) has devoted her career to infusing humanity and justice into education. She believes learning is not only intellectual but also social, emotional, creative, spiritual, physical, and deeply relational. A community-builder at heart, she creates spaces where people can imagine together, connect across difference, and move toward collective liberation.

At Stanford, Diane spent two decades teaching more than 25 courses on community building, leadership, purpose, and wellbeing, while also serving as a senior qualitative researcher at the Graduate School of Education’s Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE). There, she collaborated with Linda Darling-Hammond to study school change and the conditions that enable all students—especially low-income students and students of color—to thrive.

Her work extends beyond the university through partnerships with schools, nonprofits, and community organizations across the Bay Area, where she designs workshops and evaluations that highlight the power of arts integration as a tool for equity and deeper learning. For more than 25 years, she has supported transformative arts integration practices launched in Alameda County and carried forward by Mariah and Jessa at Studio Pathways.

She earned her B.A. in Anthropology from UC San Diego and her Ph.D. in Education Policy from UCLA—but it is her lived experience as educator, researcher, and community partner that most shapes her vision: learning spaces rooted in connection, imagination, and possibility.