By board president Rachael Himsel

2019 was a phenomenal year of growth for the Arts Alliance. We had great events throughout the year, and then came together to transform a former storagearea in College Mall into our new community arts center, ArtBeat, which has already proven successful in the short time we have been open.

To show our progress, let’s revisit our 2019 goals and outcomes:

2019 Goals and Outcomes• Provide more professional development workshops and networking opportunities for artists. GOAL MET! - Hosted a super successful speed networking / Dine and Donate event at Avers thanks to board member Terri Klingelhoefer. About 30 people attended. • Increase the visibility of Arts Alliance members in the community via targeted marketing strategies. GOAL MET! - Our “ArtBeat” started first with a radio show on WFHB of the same name, produced and hosted by our board member Dr. Filiz Cicek. To date, she has interviewed and produced 33 segments on local artists, all of which aired on WFHB and live on their site. ArtBeat is a weekly program, interviewing artists, activists and educators about their work. Each week, Dr. Filiz Cicek speaks with an artist about their craft, media, and inspiration. ArtBeat airs Tuesday mornings at 7:50 and again after 5 p.m., during the Daily Local News.

State of the Arts Alliance

Annual Report

- Hosted a great concert at the BPP featuring the talents of board secretary Barbara Lantz and her husband David, with all proceeds benefiting the Alliance. Thanks for providing the venue, board member Brad Schiesser! - Maintained Bloomington’s local online Artists Directory, where patrons can find talent–from painting a mural to live music, from photo shoots to improv actors - Created and distributed the Artist Dispatch e-newsletter - Promoted members through social media - Provided representation at meetings of the Bloomington Arts Commission, Bloomington Entertainment and Arts District, Nonprofit Alliance, and Bloomington Chamber of Commerce - Won “Best Overall Float” in 4th of July parade for the 2nd year in a row, thanks to our parade captains / board members Danielle Bruce and Terri Klingelhoeffer! • Establish the Friends of Live Music fund to support area venues to pay musicians for performances. GOAL MET! - To raise funds/awareness for our Friends of Live Music Fund, we produced our first “Dance Party on the Marina” featuring the band Ya Never Know. Thanks to our board treasurer Donna Wiesner and her husband Dave for all their hard work on this, and to board member Mary Coniaris for making this event a great success with her energy and posse of dancers! More work to be done, but the Fund grew by nearly $500 in 2019 thanks to Otto and Donna Ray, and Dave and Donna Wiesner! • Launch a new and improved Arts Alliance of Greater Bloomington website and arts directory. GOAL MET! - We went live in January, with an official announcement coming this March. The new website format automates many tasks that had been labor-intensive for us, and also gives YOU the ability to update your Directory listing yourself! Please check it out and get us your feedback. Thanks to board member and VP Joanne Shank for her work on this! • Increase awareness of fiscal sponsorship program for artists applying for grants. GOAL MET! - Two local artists - Craig Brenner (for Btown Boogies) & Meg Anderson (for Big Gay Debutante Ball) took advantage of our fiscal sponsorship program, in which artists apply to the Arts Alliance for free to sponsor an event or project; once approved, the Alliance will collect funds raised for the project, and then disburse them to the artist(s) to complete the projects, which must provide community enrichment.

2019 Goals and OutcomesContinued

Besides meeting and exceeding these goals, we reached a huge mile-stone in 2019: After much discussion, the Arts Alliance board voted to sign a lease with College Mall the day before Thanksgiving, providing

a space for several local artists to sell their work in one of the most highly-trafficked retail locations in Btown. An always-evolving work in progress, the space could not be possible without the patience, deter-mination and hard work put forth by our members!!! THANK YOU for

doing your part to keep the ArtBeat in Btown strong, and for making this arts center a hub of activity for all ages and experience levels of artists

in our area!

I know that 2020 will be an amazing year for us and therefore for our community. I truly believe that the arts are vital to the success and

growth of a healthy community, and I thank each one of you for being part of that! I am so excited to see what the year holds for us!

To our collective creativity! - Rachael

2020 Goals• Ensure ArtBeat in College Mall is sustainable and growing, and work with community groups to meet their space needs. • Introduce new arts educational programming at ArtBeat as well as other locations in the area, with a mix of free classes to meet the needs of all in the community, regardless of socioeconomic circumstances• Provide arts programming to underserved areas in our surrounding 5-county greater Bloomington area and support organizations and individuals who are already doing this • Increase the visibility of Arts Alliance members in the community via targeted marketing strategies and events / displays at ArtBeat in College Mall and other venues in the area • Provide at least 6 professional development workshops and networking opportunities for artists• Continue to grow the Friends of Live Music fund to support area venues to pay musicians for performances. Goal: $5000

The Arts Alliance of Greater Bloomington Board of Directors

Rachael Himsel, Board President - rachaelhimsel@gmail.comSince arriving in Bloomington in 2003, Rachael Himsel has been active with the Bloom-ington Playwrights Project (BPP), the John Waldron / Ivy Tech Arts Center, Cardinal Stage, and Monroe County Civic Theatre. She has helped mount art shows for local artists, and planned events for local nonprofits. At the BPP, she worked as Public Relations Direc-tor, taught theatre classes, and helped plan the first Gala to celebrate the theater’s 25th anniversary. She has also worked as a publicist for rock paper scissors inc, a local world music PR firm, and VSCpr, one of the top tech PR agencies in the Bay Area. As founder and editor of online magazine WomenWithGuts.com, she has worked with writers look-ing to tell stories about the gutsy women in their lives - literally and figuratively. Rachael has earned a BA in Music (Voice) from DePauw University and a Masters in Art Educa-tion from Indiana University.

Terri Klingelhoefer - tsklingel@gmail.comTerri Klingelhoefer, MA, LCSW, EAS-C is a native Hoosier, originally from Evansville, IN. She holds a BA in Public Relations with minors in Theatre and German from the Uni-versity of Southern Indiana, and MA in Telecommunications and an MSW from Indiana University. Ms. Klingelhoefer has been involved in puppetry since childhood. Her first appearance as a puppeteer was at age 12 in Bernie the Bicycle Breaker at the Evansville Fall Festival. Klingelhoefer has presented on the history of women in puppetry in Indi-ana for the 2018 Hoosier Women at Work Conference and will present on the history of puppetry in Indiana at Kuklafest in Saugatuck, MI in May of 2019. She has performed with her husband as Klingler-Engle Puppets. Klingelhoefer is currently President of the Indiana Puppetry Guild, and has served as Treasurer of the Great Lakes Region of the Puppeteers of America and on the Board of Directors of Peewinkle’s Puppet Studio. Klingelhoefer Left the Peewinkle’s Board in 2018 to become their grant writer. Klingel-hoefer is a psychotherapeutic social worker for Serenity Now in Bedford, IN.

Mary Hoedeman Coniaris - mconiaris@mac.comThe year was 1981. Urban Cowboy, staring John Travolta, had just come out and the cowboy craze began sweeping the world. Mary answered an ad in the newspaper stating, “dance instructors needed, will train”. She was hired on the spot, put in training class for 3 days, and began teaching country dancing full time, sometimes staying just a few lessons ahead of her students. Within months Mary was winning competitions, top teacher awards, and was promoted to asssistant manger and then manager of Exclusive Dance Club in Houston, TX. In 1986 Texas Dance Production contracted Mary to be the lead dancer/teacher in their line of instructional videos which were sold on TNN around the showing of the White Horse Saloon Dance show. The sales and exposure quickly led to a full time travel schedule, 340 days a year, throughout the US and Canada in which Mary was personally responsible for teaching over 20,000 people and sharing her love of dance. During this time Pepsi Co made her their National Spokesman. In 1989, Mary and her partner won their first UCWDC division 1 competiton in Las Vegas Nevada followed by numerous national titles and finishing in the top 5 in the World Competitions. She choreographed for Ricky Van Shelton’s music video to “Wild Man”. In 1994, Mary became her own video producer, scripting, hiring talent, overseeing editing, and mar-keting for 9 more instructional videos making her current total 25. She also created a Dance Camp for adults where students came from all over the US, Canada, and parts of Europe to train for a week. Every camp, they choreographed a dance and performed it live on national television at the Wild Horse Saloon.She successfully developed a huge following at Indiana University, 120 students every semester with a wait list. One significant event, she choreographed a dance to “Keep Your Head Up” by Andy Grammar which her 100 plus students performed as a Flashmob to bring awareness to the health risks of looking down at smartphones and tablets.Mary’s latest creation is a new online train-ing system, DanceTodayTM, offering today’s technology, today’s music, and today’s convenience.

Brad Schiesser - brschiesser@aol.comBrad Schiesser is the Managing Director of Bloomington Playwrights Project. Before taking the job at BPP, he worked for many years in fundraising for Barrington Stage Com-pany in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. An Indiana native from South Bend, he holds both a BA in Theatre and Drama and a MA of Arts in Arts Administration from Indiana University. He firmly believes that new work is the life blood of all art and is committed to training and challenging the next generation of great artists. He is excited to see the growth in arts education for all in Bloomington.

The Arts Alliance of Greater Bloomington Board of Directors

Barbara Lantz - secretary@bloomingtonarts.orgBarbara Lantz has had a balanced career in both business and the arts. A singer/song-writer, she has performed at numerous venues including the Little Nashville Opry and the Bluebird during her three-decade long career. She has recorded several albums, in-cluding Power of Spirit with the Spudpuppies, which was created as for a benefit to raise money to save Native American Chief Joseph’s gravesite. She has also written a book called The Return of Chief Joseph and a second book, Soul on Fire.

Joanne Shank, Vice President - joanneshank@gmail.comJoanne Shank has served on the Board of Windfall Dancers, has performed in a number of independent multimedia presentations, and has choreographed movement to poetry, sound, and projected images. One of these productions received an IAC grant submitted by local poet Bronislava Volkova.

Dr. Filiz Cicek - filiz.cicek@gmail.comDr. Filiz Cicek is an artist, scholar and journalist who is currently serving as a Fulbright specialist for the Arts. She received her MFA and PhD from IU, Bloomington and has been teaching gender, art and cinema courses at various IU campuses as well as at Bosphorus University summer school in Istanbul. As a curator she organized Blooming-ton Katmandu, Museum of Broken Relationships and Women Exposed International Art Exhibits. As an artist, she has exhibited her work in museums and galleries in New York, Chicago, California, The Kinsey Institute, IU School of Fine Arts Gallery and various ven-ues in Bloomington. Since 2009, Dr. Cicek has been contributing to The Ryder Maga- zine as a co-editor, writer, artist, graphic designer, and as an event coordinator. She has also written for local national and international journals and newspapers on art, gender and cinema. She is the regional coordinator for The Feminist Art Project based at Rutgers University, New York.

Danielle Bruce - sistersbruce@gmail.comDanielle Bruce was born in Southern California but has had the good fortune of calling Bloomington home since arriving here in 1988. She has spent the majority of her life in the theatre, occasionally as an actor but primarily as a designer and director. Locally, her work includes the artistic direction for Storyzilla, direction of the 2013 in-carnation of The Breeze Bends the Grass, design work for Monroe County Civic Theatre and the Bloomington Playwrights Project. In addition to working in the theatre, she has spent the last ten years cultivating her talents as a freelance designer and visual artist in both the public and private sector. She also donates her time and talents to various not for profit organizations such as Middle Way House and My Sister’s Closet, of which she is a board member. Donna Wiesner, Treasurer - treasurer@bloomingtonarts.orgDonna Wiesner has joined the board of the Arts Alliance because of her love of the arts, especially music. She has been singing her whole life. Donna education, listed below, has prepared her well for dealing with anything that needs to be written, organized or researched. Her experience includes owning and running two business, (including a law firm) and writing contracts, bylaws, and other organizational documents. She is also a founder and on the board of the Hoosier Community Chorus which is in its infancy. “I would love to help with such a worthy, and potentially life changing organization.”