FIRST EXPOSURE: STAFF EDITION
This fall, we’re shining a spotlight on our younger students through our First Exposure campaign to support 72 middle school students in our Baltimore Speaks Out (BSO) program. In this blog post, we’re hitting rewind with three staff members to learn how they discovered media in middle school and where it’s taken them.
Get to know Susan Malone (Executive Director) and our two newest program staff, Peymaan Motevalli-Aliabadi (Administrative & Operations Manager) and Natalie Thomas (BSO Assistant Media Instructor) as they take a walk down memory lane.
I grew up outside Philadelphia and in 7th grade, I was given access to my first Pentax k1000 camera. I still have my first contact strip and the first image I made. I was drawn into nature and being outside in quiet reflective spaces. In a group darkroom I could develop my own film and print images. This opportunity was so rare - to have access to equipment, to a darkroom, to unlimited supplies, and a talented teacher, Mr. Blue, let us go in whenever we had free periods, and I was always late to my other classes - I loved every second of being in that space, especially as a really shy student. That year, as I was learning photography, I was also preparing for my Bat Mitzvah. The time studying Hebrew inflamed my vocal chords, resulting in chronic laryngitis. To help resolve it, I was in speech therapy, and I had to be silent to rest my voice. So, the camera became my voice. I was voiceless and the camera became my voice.
In high school, we didn't have a dark room. It was a huge shift for me, and I missed it deeply. So, I raised money with my art teacher Mr. Sutton, to create a one person dark room. By the time I graduated, it had been expanded to nine workstations. Photography started as an individual passion, but it also ignited my journey of fundraising for something I love. It was my first step into the world of philanthropy and arts and ultimately it’s what brought me to Baltimore.
When I graduated from MICA with a Photography degree, I was prepared to be creative, not to enter the field of community arts, so I struggled to find my place in the world. I was navigating the complex field of media. For the first few years, the search for the right career left me exhausted and questioning my motives. When I joined Wide Angle, I was overjoyed to find this field where education, media making, and civic engagement came together in one place, where people worked together, to amplify voices and stories. I could leverage both my love for image-making that I discovered in middle school and my talent of fundraising that I started in high school.
My interest in art and animation started at home, creating different lives with lego people and making animations. It made me a visual learner, and was an underlying passion for what I wanted to be around. It was important for me, and it was one way I learned how to process things emotionally. I went to Roland Park for elementary and middle school. Despite being at a highly resourced school, we didn’t have access to advanced arts or media production classes, so I got involved in debate.
I went to City for high school, and continued to debate. I learned critical thinking and used my imagination to weigh different political and social world options. My passion for imagining a better world and what is required to get there, along with the training available to me helped me become a finalist in the biggest national policy debate tournament in the country. My interest in art and media on the other hand, stayed internal - I had a film class, but the resources were not the best. I went to schools in the city that have so many more resources, but there wasn’t digital media programming. When I got to college at a private institution, so many people had a huge head start from their middle school and high school experiences.
I majored in Film and Electronic Arts and I am working at Wide Angle, using my critical thinking skills and media production knowhow to support the art and creative practice of students. Digital engagement is the art in popular culture, but as I experienced first-hand, there’s less access to it for many students. When young people are given resources about the things they want to see and feel early on, it opens pathways to make those images later in their lives and helps them to be aware of how images are used to communicate in the media around them.
Images that are typically in the media are extremely intentional. Our media landscape is changing - it is incorporating more perspectives from people who have experienced different forms of systemic oppression. But when I was growing up, that wasn’t the case. Having a critical thinking background allowed me to see how the news and the images used can affect a person’s mental health, feeling of self-worth and self-respect. That’s something that I think our teachers are training in young people - how to image themselves and to imagine what a good image of them should be. What images make them happy? What about images can have that impact on their self-worth? What in an image brings them joy?
I went to a pretty artsy middle school - I was in the first class of their graduating 8th graders at Baltimore’s public Montessori school. We had groups that did different things (cooking, design, etc), and I chose media. We created advocacy videos about what we wanted in the school - one request was a speed bump on the road because people drove by too quickly - and presented our videos to the school board at North Ave. The experience gave us a positive way to express ourselves - instead of protesting, media making gave us another, more productive way, to get others to listen. It was our way to say we want more safety. It gave me another skill and another way to express how I’m feeling. That was my first introduction to media making.
In high school, I got more into cheerleading and stepped away from media making. I went to St. Frances Academy, which was completely different from Montessori. It’s a very small Catholic school, maybe 200 students. My great, great aunt and great, great grandmother went to that school, and my sister did when I was a baby. It was nice to have a legacy going there - that was really important. It ended up being one of my favorite things about the school. I became an ambassador, acting as a tour guide for donors.
After I graduated high school, I created a documentary about St. Frances Academy and its history within Baltimore. When I first had the idea of the documentary, I was at Bowie State and majoring in business. I was a cheerleader there, but the academics weren’t right for me. I switched to Morgan and majored in Video Production. I chose media production because it is never ending. We’ll always need it, it’s becoming more advanced and it’s nice to see other people who love it just as much as I do. I like learning and gaining new skills, and that’s easy in the field. It keeps your creative juices flowing - there’s so much about Baltimore you can talk about and put on the screen. After I graduated, I found Wide Angle and everything came full circle. It was a mix of what I wanted to do - working with children and teaching media production to give them the same first exposure experience to media that I had (and I still coach cheer at St. Frances).
Baltimore Speaks Out connects to so many themes Nat, Peymaan and Sue have touched upon. As youth practice media literacy and develop projects, they are learning life-long skills and for some, cultivating a life-long passion. Your investment in the passions and creativity our students will take with them well into the future, as they continue on their own artistic and professional journeys.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Moira discovered her interest for visual art in middle school, and cultivated that passion in high school and college (where she studied painting and photography). She moved to Maryland to pursue her Masters in Community Arts at Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008 and spent five years working with BCCC’s Refugee Youth Project to support the social and emotional integration of refugees. She has over fifteen years of experience in creative youth development and has worked with communities in Baltimore, as well as in Honduras, Nicaragua, Vietnam, England and India. In Fall 2013, she joined Wide Angle as the Youth Photography Traveling Exhibition Coordinator. In 2015, Moira took on the Program Director role and in 2018 she transitioned to the Development and Communications Director.