4. Danielle Fodor and Meaghan Brady Nelson

Danielle is an artist, teacher and community organizer living in Davis, CA. She creates artworks that transform people, places, and communities by working in a variety of mediums, including murals, ‘zines, performance, audio and posters.

Meaghan is an arts educator at Belmont University in Tennessee.  She collaboratively created a huge Kids’ Arts Festival south of Nashville, that in its recent year attracted 6,000 attendees.

The two met for the first time at the Imagining America conference about an hour before they sat down to record their conversation.  They quickly bonded over talking about the art they do in communities.

They talk about the role of the arts in building kids’ identities, how art can be inserted into non-art areas of learning, the value of families making art together and how most artists are uncomfortable with the chaos of creating in community.