Alicia Anstead NF '08

Alicia Anstead is a writer, editor, producer and educator. In addition to heading up programming for artist engagement with students, she is a member of the OFA Senior Management team, the producer of the annual Harvard Arts Festival and an instructor in the journalism and writing programs at Harvard University Extension School. She is a director, with Marvin Merritt '20, of Downeast Speaks, an annual community storytelling event with ISLE Theater Company in Deer Isle, Maine. She is also a contributing producer, storytelling coach and strategist for APAP|NYC, the largest annual conference of performing arts professionals. She was previously executive editor of Inside Arts, the magazine for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals in Washington, DC, and of The Writer magazine in Boston. As a reporter at the Bangor Daily News in Maine, she won many awards for her arts writing and, in 2004, was the first Maine reporter to onsite report on the war in Iraq. Her work has appears in the New York Times and has been featured in the historical journal Chebacco, Boston Globe, Scientific American, Harvard Gazette, Chamber Music Magazine and Art New England. She has been an arts and food contributor to The Callie Crossley Show and Under the Radar with Callie Crossley on WGBH in Boston and NPR's Morning Edition. Alicia is also the host Signatures, an online gallery at Witherle Library in Castine, Maine. An English department graduate of American University (B.A.) and the University of Maine (M.A.), Alicia focused her academic work on Black literature, Shakespeare and women's literature. She has been a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University and NEA arts editors program at Duke University. She has worked with the Sphinx Organization, where she co-produced the first two SphinxCon conferences on diversity in the arts in Detroit, the Boston Book Festival, Word Festival in Blue Hill, Maine, Shakespeare in Stonington at Opera House Arts, Sister Cities International, the National Archives Foundation and the Authors Guild Foundation.