Cara Mia Theatre is, perhaps, doing the best job of any local theater company — and maybe of any arts organization — of reaching out to its audience and trying to continue the conversation its productions are meant to start. In recent years, artistic director David Lozano hired long-time civil rights activist Ernest McMillan to curate its community engagement efforts.
Now, to take that further, they’ve hired Cheyenne Raquel Farley as Cara Mia’s first full-time education coordinator. The theater says it expects “a 25 percent increase in the number of youth served, programs provided, and artist hours, averaging an increase of 2,000 youth yearly.”
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Cara Mía to Increase Educational Impact through Grant from the Simmons Sisters Fund & the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC)
Dallas, TX (06/04/19) Cara Mía Theatre (CMT) is proud to announce grant awards from the Simmons Sisters Fund and the NALAC Fund for the Arts to support the hiring of Cheyenne Raquel Farley, the company’s first full-time Education Coordinator. CMT is thrilled to announce this first-time grant award from the Simmons Sisters Fund. CMT’s past support from NALAC has been instrumental in the company’s recent growth from a small to a mid-sized non-profit.
Cheyenne Farley is charged with increasing the growth of CMT’s educational programs for youth, maintain and continue to innovate best practices, continue to increase the number of programs delivered and students served, and begin to develop new programs in accordance with CMT’s upcoming strategic plan.
CMT’s educational programs bring theatre, music and visual arts classes and performances to underserved youth throughout Dallas. Currently, over 70% of the Dallas ISD student body is Latinx. At this time, CMT is the only professional Latinx theatre in Dallas to regularly tour an expansive repertory of bilingual, culturally-based Latinx plays and provide a roster of various multicultural and multidisciplinary arts classes to Dallas schools and cultural centers.
Cheyenne Raquel Farley is a Dallas-based theater educator and artist, musician and playwright. She has a deep passion for arts education and community. She is an alumna of Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. After earning a conservatory certification from Stephens College in Columbia, MO she returned to the DFW area to finish her education and launch her career as an educator. Cheyenne is a graduate from the University of North Texas and holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts focused in Theater Education, Music, and Ethnic Studies. She previously served as both the Interim Manager of Education and a Teaching Artist at the 2017 Tony Award Winning, Dallas Theater Center where she previously served as the 2018 Education SummerStage Coordinator.
“We are very excited to welcome Cheyenne to our team,” says Managing Director Ariana Cook. “We are looking forward to growing our department under Cheyenne’s leadership so we can expand our reach to youth in our community.” During Cheyenne’s first year, CMT anticipates a 25% increase in the number of youth served, programs provided and artist hours, averaging an increase of 2,000 youth yearly.
ABOUT SIMMONS SISTERS FUND The Simmons Sisters Fund is part of the Harold Simmons Foundation. The Harold Simmons Foundation, established in 1988, is based in Dallas, Texas and is funded primarily by Contran Corporation, an investment company founded by the late investor, Harold Clark Simmons. The Harold Simmons Foundation seeks to improve the quality of life of all members of our community and to ensure they have the resources and opportunities to live with dignity and meaning. The Foundation strives to invest strategically in programs that support systems change and scalability of impact. We support organizations that promote early health and development, safe and enriching environments, and comprehensive support systems for individuals, children, and families. We believe advocacy and research are key elements in this work.
ABOUT NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF LATINO ARTS AND CULTURES The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) is the nation’s premier nonprofit organization exclusively dedicated to the promotion, advancement, development and cultivation of the Latino arts field. In this capacity, NALAC stimulates and facilitates intergenerational dialogues among disciplines, languages and traditional and contemporary expressions.
ABOUT CARA MÍA THEATRE Cara Mía Theatre inspires and engages people to uplift their communities through transformative Latinx theatre, multicultural youth arts experiences and community action. In 1996, co-founder Eliberto Gonzalez founded Cara Mía Theatre because he believed that Chicano literature and its writers ought to be more accessible to the general public. With Adelina Anthony, Gonzalez started the company as a vehicle to bring the Mexican-American experience to Dallas stages. The cultural breadth of CMT’s plays has since expanded and the company’s artistic approach has simultaneously evolved, especially since the arrival of current Executive Artistic Director David Lozano in 2002. To expand the company’s reach to non-theatre going Latinos, Lozano chose to focus on creating new bilingual plays that were both topical and theatrically unique. Trained in physical theatre, Lozano formed a resident artistic ensemble that devised new works in the form of clown and mask performance, poetic movement and topical, issue-driven plays to speak to the experiences of the local Latinos. Today, CMT boasts of a resident artistic ensemble that creates new works and also produces classic and new plays by the most acclaimed Latinx playwrights in the nation.
Cara Mía Theatre is sponsored by the Law Offices of Domingo Garcia, Mercado369, Latino Center for Leadership Development, City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs, Dallas Tourism Public Improvement District, Ignite/Arts Dallas, Performing Arts Endowment Fund of the Communities Foundation of Texas, TACA, Embrey Family Foundation, Texas Commission on the Arts, The Shubert Foundation, the Jean Baptiste (Tad) Adoue III Fund of The Dallas Foundation, Melinda D. and Jim A. Johnson, the Hillcrest Foundation, Sammons Center for the Arts, and the Latino Cultural Center. Executive Artistic Director: David Lozano Media Contact: Matthew Roy Rodriguez 214.516.0706 [email protected] ###
