Communication Project

Year One Artists:

Mary Knysh (Music/Rhythm Artist) is a professional musician, multi-instrumentalist, recording artist, workshop facilitator, and innovative educator.   Over the past twenty-five years she has worked with the New Jersey Abbott Preschool projects, Head Start Program, and a wide variety of rural and inner city early education communities throughout the northeast. 

Mary has presented her unique program, Improvised Music and Movement for Young Children, at many Early Education Conferences throughout the country.  Mary is a certified Orff Schulwerk clinician and has presented at Orff conferences and chapters both in the US and abroad.  As an artist on the rosters of the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, NY state BOCES, and NJ and CT Young Audiences, Mary’s Rhythm Village workshops are designed to help individuals recognize their own unique musical skills, enhance creativity, promote cooperative non-verbal communication, and create a solid sense of community.   Her studies of a broad range of ethnic music traditions including African, Southern Indian, Caribbean, and Indonesian enrich all of her work. 

Mary's new book, Boom Do Pa, outlines a host of creative and innovative ideas for music and movement improvisation activities for all ages. Mary is a staff member of  the Music for People Musicianship and Leadership Program  in the United States and in Switzerland.   

Rand Whipple’s (Theatre Artist) work as a performer has taken him to eleven countries on four continents. Born in the Midwest, he became involved in movement theatre with the Northwestern University Mime Company, and later studied acting with the late, renowned acting teacher, Alvina Krause in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. There he helped to found the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble and later, Box Of Light Theatre.  Whipple is a regular performer at the Smithsonian Institution’s Discovery Theatre and his work has been presented on public television.

In 1988, Whipple was among the first recipients of the Individual Artistic Development grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Under the grant, Whipple explored the use of interactive technology in live performance. He was later awarded a Playwright's Fellowship to develop material for solo performances.

Whipple’s work with early childhood residencies has dramatically changed his view of performance. “Working with the three-to-five year old children revolutionized the way I perform, or at least the way I feel out my contact with the audience.”

Aleta Wynn Yarrow (Visual Artist) has worked with the National Institute for Museum and Library Services, Corning Museum of Art, NY State Arts Educators Association, PA Art Educators Association, and the Pennsylvania College of Technology.   Her work is represented by the West End Gallery in Corning, NY, and has been exhibited at the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira and the Rockwell Museum in Corning.   She began working with early childhood classrooms in the late 1990’s and is one of the few visual artists in PA who focuses on early childhood.  “A connection to the land, a love of pattern and color, and a balance of technique and vision are the threads that bind my work in media.”

Fiona Siobhan Powell (Storyteller) was born into a family of actors and lawyers, so it was inevitable that she was gifted in speech from an early age. What wasn’t expected by any of her family was that she would decide to pursue a career in Agriculture!  After years of working as a shepherd in Wales and England, Fiona traveled to the United States in 1987, with her four children, eager to further her career. Unfortunately there was little work for shepherds in Pennsylvania!

It was a happy accident that Fiona began sharing with friends and family the stories and folktales she had collected over many years. Stories from old books and older folk willing to share; stories collected in pubs and in lambing pens.  Fiona now travels around the US sharing these tales, as well as the Pennsylvania tales she is now collecting. Fiona always travels with her spinning wheel and often wears costume as she shares with both the young and old.   Of Welsh and Scots descent, Fiona specializes in tales from Wales, Wessex, Cornish “piskie” tales, and Scots “brownie” stories.

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