Staff
PS 75 Photo Credit: Lori Spears
Katherine Gressel, Program Manager
As Arts to Grow's program manager, Katherine recruits and supports teaching artists and interns, and oversees two school partnerships, program evaluation, PR and web updates, and new site development. Katherine Gressel brings an interdisciplinary background in arts education and arts administration. Before joining Arts to Grow, she served as the Director of Partnerships and Development at the Urban Assembly School of Music and Art (UAMA), a small arts-based public high school in Downtown Brooklyn. At UAMA, she served as the primary liaison between the school and its outside partners in the arts and business communities, coordinating special trips and events, and spearheading UAMA's first major public relations and fundraising campaign as well as new after-school and internship programs.
Katherine holds a B.A. in art from Yale, and has led youth mural projects in New York and San Francisco, and exhibited artwork at the Brooklyn Public Library, the Brooklyn Arts Council, and smaller galleries. Her scholarly writing on socially-engaged collaborative art has been presented in the CUNY Graduate Center's online journal and in the 2007 Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts conference at NYU.
Katherine has worked as a teaching artist for the Brooklyn Museum, the CityKids Foundation, and Community-Word Project among other organizations, and is a freelance public art project manager for the renowned artist team Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel and grantwriter for Creative Time. While earning her MA in Arts Administration from Columbia University Teachers College, Katherine pursued internships at Groundswell Community Mural Project, CITYarts, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Sara Lise Raff, Arts Education Specialist
Sara Lise Raff, who began her career as a New York City elementary school teacher, was a driving force in the training of teaching artists in her school. She was instrumental in the communication between teachers and artists in the very first round of the Annenberg Grant partnership with the New York City Board of Education.
Sara Lise was the first director of programs at Education Through Music, Inc. (ETM), a not-for-profit arts organization in New York City. In this role, she established and fostered many arts education partnerships throughout New York City. With her customized training programs and an intensive summer training academy, she hired, groomed, and managed teaching artists for arts education positions in ten elementary schools in the New York City Public Schools.
Sara Lise has continued to be a mentor and formulate assessment tools, training sessions, and workshops for teaching artists with various arts organizations. She continues to provide quality instruction for students in the arts.
Sara Lise graduated Hunter College with a dual degree in education and developmental theater. She also has a graduate degree in elementary science education from Hunter College.
