NYC Arts in Education Roundtable Mentorship Program

2025 Cohort — Stay tuned for resulting projects…

PEACE Project Student Ambassador Program Teaching Artist Co-Facilitator

2025 Cohort — Stay tuned for resulting projects…

PAC’s PEACE PARTICIPANT
2024-2025 Cohort
Project Experiences Underway!

Stay tuned for resulting projects…

ABOUT PAC PEACE PROJECT
Partners in Education, Arts, & Community Empowerment (PEACE) at Patchogue Arts Council (PAC) is a program that empowers educators in Suffolk county middle and high schools to make more effective use of the arts for underrepresented students through College, Career, and Civic Readiness (CCCR) and Culturally Responsive-Sustaining education (CR-S), which are urgent issues in local, state, and national education.

This 5-year program is supported 100% by federal funds awarded through a highly competitive grant process awarded by the US Department of Education. As an ambitious and leading arts organization of Long Island, the Patchogue Arts Council is proud to continue the work and research this project has established.

The PEACE project was inspired by ten years of research conducted by Eastern Suffolk BOCES with funding from the US Department of Education, which found that learning experiences planned in schools among teachers, artists, and cultural organizations could strengthen student critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity, often known as 21st Century skills.

Kinetic Canvas Workshop Experience

North Fork Arts Center (NFAC) at Sappan Greeport Theatre

August 2024

Collaboration with Classical Pianist Paolo Bartolani creating a 5-Day Summer Workshop Combining Light Painting Photography & Video with Improvisational Music & Sound and Interpretive Movement

Culminating in a Live Interactive Performance
For Children Aged 12-16

BEYOND WORDS
LANGUAGE & RESILIENCE

February 18, 2025

Languages are a cultural expression of a community. People share their languages through music, photography, bodies, painting, poetry, and a million other ways that transcend the spoken word. The question is who is listening? What strategies do the “small voices” of minorities, social activists, and marginalized groups employ to overcome the deafening rumble of the ruling majority?

I am one of several student and faculty presentations this year in a wonderful annual event that celebrates diversity and language expression.

I will talk about how photography is a powerful form of visual “language”, and as examples of this, I will show student work from my class from the assignment I give after teaching them how to create their own Light Paintings. The them for the assignments is “Light of Love / Language of Love”. The event will culminate with an audience-participation Light Painting!

KEVIN WOOD PODCAST

Discussion about Light Painting at the Tesla Science Center Annual Gala

November 21, 2024

Steinert High School

STUDENT LIGHT PAINTING WORKSHOPS

October 25, 2024

ARTWORKS

Trenton NJ’s Downtown Visual Arts Center

LEARNING TO LOOK PODCAST
WITH HOST JOHN CINO

Discussion about the history of using of LIGHT as a medium in art

October 16, 2024

Museum of Contemporary Arts (MoCA)

Patchogue Arts Council Gallery

MoCA L.I.GHTS FESTIVAL 2024

LIVE INTERACTIVE PROJECTION LIGHT PAINTING

October 10 through 13, 2024

Every night at 7:30, 8:30 & 9:30pm

Museum of Contemporary Arts (MoCA)

Patchogue Arts Council Gallery

Community opportunity to ‘paint with light’ onto the Patchogue-Medford Library. Everyone is invited to create light art in the air that will be magically projected in real time onto a virtual blank canvas, the entire façade of the Main Street Patchogue-Medford Library!

This public event is part of an interactive installation created by Light Painting Artist Alina Wilczynski utilizing traditional camera long exposures in combination with video light painting and projection mapping software.

All ages, all abilities are welcome to participate in this rare opportunity to be an actual large-scale projection artist among all the incredible projections on buildings and other structures throughout downtown Patchogue during MoCA Lights Festival 2024! Light tools will be provided.

In between the interactive demonstrations will be a projection display of Light Painting art created by Alina Wilczynski, including still photographs, video pieces and behind-the-scenes clips from last year’s MoCA Lights Festival, as well as samples of the artist’s work currently on view in the exhibit titled, “Motion in Light” in the Claire Davidson Siegel Gallery inside the Patchogue-Medford Library through October 26, 2024.

PAC’s PEACE PARTICIPANT
2023-2024 Cohort
Collaboration with Classical Pianist Paolo Bartolani & Director of Fine & Performing Arts at Islip School District Michael Herschowitz and 87 Art & Music Students in creating an inside-the-music hands-on experience

I was honored to be a featured filmmaker in the inaugural PAC PEACE Film Festival

ABOUT PAC PEACE PROJECT
Partners in Education, Arts, & Community Empowerment (PEACE) at Patchogue Arts Council (PAC) is a program that empowers educators in Suffolk county middle and high schools to make more effective use of the arts for underrepresented students through College, Career, and Civic Readiness (CCCR) and Culturally Responsive-Sustaining education (CR-S), which are urgent issues in local, state, and national education.

This 5-year program is supported 100% by federal funds awarded through a highly competitive grant process awarded by the US Department of Education. As an ambitious and leading arts organization of Long Island, the Patchogue Arts Council is proud to continue the work and research this project has established.

The PEACE project was inspired by ten years of research conducted by Eastern Suffolk BOCES with funding from the US Department of Education, which found that learning experiences planned in schools among teachers, artists, and cultural organizations could strengthen student critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity, often known as 21st Century skills.

Arts education in Suffolk County will be more empowering for young people, specifically those who have been under-represented in middle and high schools, thanks to the Patchogue Arts Council (PAC) and a $1.8 million grant from the US Department of Education for their Partners in Education, Arts, and Community Empowerment (PEACE) project. PEACE will first empower educators in the Suffolk County region of Long Island, NY to use their creativity to explore issues of importance for underrepresented students. Then PAC will support partnerships between local artists and cultural organizations to help students achieve college and career readiness using more culturally responsive approach.

Kinetic Canvas Workshop Experience

North Fork Arts Center (NFAC) at Sappan Greeport Theatre

August 2024

Collaboration with Classical Pianist Paolo Bartolani creating a 5-Day Summer Workshop Combining Light Painting Photography & Video with Improvisational Music & Sound and Interpretive Movement

Culminating in a Live Interactive Performance
For Children Aged 12-16

RECENT PAST EVENTS

MoCA L.I.GHTS FESTIVAL 2023

LIVE INTERACTIVE PROJECTION LIGHT PAINTING

October 6 & 7, 2023

Museum of Contemporary Arts (MoCA)

Patchogue Arts Council Gallery

PORT TALKS VIDEO PODCAST
with Alina Wilczynski
LIGHT PAINTING PHOTOGRAPHER

APRIL 27, 2023

Port Jefferson, NY

STUDIO PRACTICUM
SPRING 2023 FACULTY SURVEY EXHIBIT
OPENING RECEPTION LIGHT PAINTING DEMONSTRATION

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

Memorial Gallery
SUNY Farmingdale State College
Farmingdale, NY

SUNY POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE
ART-TECH EXHIBITION

APRIL 12 – JUNE 3, 2022

Gannett Gallery
SUNY Polytechnic Institute
Utica, NY

Video Installation

THE BREATHING PROJECT
2021 EXHBIT NYC

The Breathing Project was a global forward-looking, multidisciplinary artistic engagement that paired artists, musicians, and poets with healthcare and frontline workers, students, and the elderly who were impacted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Artworks honored stories, tragic or inspiring, to foster a global culture of understanding and shared experiences.

Video Installation / International Call for Artists

WORLD RIDE WOMEN’S MOUNTAIN BIKING VIRTUAL FILM FESTIVAL

SCREENED ENTRY: 2020

Honorable Mention / Finalist

PAST EXHIBIT HIGHLIGHTS

Group Show Highlights:

UUFSB Stony Brook (NY)
Westbeth Gallery (NYC)
Leslie Lohman Gallery (NYC)
GMHC AIDS Dance-A-Thon Art Exhibition Space at the Passenger Ship Terminal (NYC)

Subculture Gallery (NYC)

Exhibiting Artist/Member (1996-1999)

Monsoon Images (NYC)

Limited Representation (2001-2010)

Getty Images

Limited Licensing of images (2007-2010)

PAST TALKS, PRESENTATIONS & PANEL DISCUSSION HIGHLIGHTS

Producer of “Women on a Mission: Lesbian Pioneers, Mavericks & Mavens in a Mastermind Session about Leadership”

Presented at New World Stages, NYC (300+ attendees) while part of the inaugural LGBT Committee of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce (2009)

Participant on a Soloprenier Panel Discussion Event hosted by the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce (2009)

Panelist at the Q-Me Con NYC Queer Women’s Media Makers Summit (2008)

Montclair State University Alumni Speaker Series

BURNING PRIDE NYC

The New York Public Library
in partnership with The LGBT Community Center (NYC)

Featured Photographer/Artist exhibit titled “Burning Pride” in gallery spaces on two floors and several common spaces throughout the upper floors of The LGBT Center (2006)

Suspended from the apex of the third-story, semi-circle skylight that brings flooding light from the top floors to the ground floor atrium of the NYC of the LGBT Center’s, the colors of pride in the form of a Tibetan prayer flag graced sumi-e black ink paintings on rice paper as part of the Center’s Pride Month art installation sponsored by New York Public Library.

The three-part installation spanned past to present work, with glimpses of portrait studies of lesbian gender identity, society’s uneasiness with androgenous women, erotic role-play based on gender stereotypes and fetishism. Hung from rusty window guards hack-sawed from her fourth-floor Brooklyn loft studio, images are transferred onto metal, fabric, hand-made papers and found materials.

A second set of images were transferred onto gold-leaf Chinese paper offerings set on fire and extinguished in varying degrees of disappearance. “Traditionally burned at the anniversary of a loved ones passing to ensure prosperity for the deceased in the spirit realm, the ritualistic burning of these papers and the images on them represent the death of my ‘coming out’ years by looking back at the vestiges of that experience — stream-of-consciousness writings and photography from that time. I can recognize that each completed piece is a closed and sealed time capsule of painful questioning, hurts and losses, as well as a burning sense of pride and transcendence. In burning these pieces, I am honoring the life-affirming process of discovering, finding comfort with and expressing my personal truths of sexuality and gender identity. In the tradition of the papers, I am sending prosperity of experience to those who are at the beginning of their bumpy journey of discovery and pride.”

These sumi-e ink paintings were part of a study of wabi-sabi, a philosophy of art-making based on the universal principle that “everything is either devolving towards or evolving from nothingness.” The string of prayer flags that introduce the sumi-e paintings served to carry my thoughts of compassion, fearlessness, fulfillment and prosperity to the wind.

VOLUNTEER BOARD POSITIONS

Co-founding Board Member of OP/LYNX, the Women’s Network of Out Professionals (The Nation’s Leading Gay & Lesbian Business Network)

Our initiatives were aimed at ‘lynk-ing’ community partners and lesbian-owned small businesses throughout the NYC area. Events included business panels and presentations, networking socials and cultural events and were hosted at museums & galleries, theaters, restaurants and corporate spaces including Asia Society & Museum, American Folk Art Museum and MoMA.

LGBT Executive Committee Member & Marketing Chair of The Manhattan Chamber of Commerce

Because of my work with OP/LYNX, I was invited to lead similar initiatives for the MCC.