Emalie Mayo was an arts advocate, educator, administrator, and community life force who devoted herself to the young people and artists of Greater New Haven. A longtime resident of the city, she held a BS in Psychology Research with a minor in English from Southern Connecticut State University and a teaching certification in English/Language Arts. She joined Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre in 2009 as a Senior Administrative Assistant and became, for more than a decade, the Project Coordinator for the Dwight/Edgewood Project — the beloved after-school playwriting program for New Haven middle school students that she helped sustain through the pandemic and beyond. She was a founding force of the Elm City LIT Fest, a core organizer of the Arts Council’s Artist Corps program, and a trainer with artEquity, the Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond, and the Community Leadership Program New Haven. She received a Racial Equity and Creative Healing Grant from the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven to support Playmaking New Haven which offered workshops, performance opportunities, and mentorship to young artists. Everyone who worked alongside her remembered the same thing: she was never the loudest voice in the room, but she was always the most intentional. Emalie Mayo passed away in March 2024. Her legacy lives on in every story she helped bring to the stage, and every young person she championed.

Marcella Monk Flake is a New Haven educator, arts leader, and cultural steward whose work sits at the intersection of jazz heritage, youth development, and community joy. A retired Talented and Gifted teacher with 37 years in New Haven public schools, she is the founder and executive director of Monk Youth Jazz and STEAM Collective, Inc., an after-school and community engagement program that blends music instruction with science, technology, engineering, architecture, financial literacy, human anatomy, and the arts. Her family connection to the work is personal and profound: her father was first cousin to jazz legend Thelonious Monk, and she has spent decades honoring that legacy while ensuring it belongs to the next generation. Under her leadership, the program — centered at the Diwell/Yale Community Learning Center — has brought in Grammy award-winning musicians, hosted scholar competitions and vocal workshops, and centered the idea that New Haven's children deserve to see professionals who look like themselves in every field. In 2024, the State of Connecticut named her a Connecticut Arts Hero, calling her "one of the most compassionate and genuine arts leaders of her generation.”

Founded in 1995 and anchored by its beloved free summer performances in Edgerton Park, Elm Shakespeare Company has grown from a small gathering of like-minded theatre practitioners into one of New Haven's most enduring cultural institutions — serving over half a million people since its founding. A professional, multicultural nonprofit, Elm Shakespeare is committed to bringing people together through Shakespeare, making the plays accessible and relevant to audiences of all ages, backgrounds, and means through bold, free professional performances, challenging community conversations, and deeply rooted education programs. Its signature youth initiatives include Elm Apprentice Company (formerly Scholars), which offers advanced students paid opportunities to work alongside professionals on and offstage, the Teen Troupe acting ensemble, and Players Camp. Elm Shakespeare’s two-day Youth Festival serves as the celebratory culmination for 100 students from multiple high school residencies. With many long-standing partnerships and a community conversation series -- Building a Brave New Theatre-- which tackles one pressing social issue each year, Elm Shakespeare has reimagined what a 21st century theatre can be - in parks, classrooms, and neighborhoods — guided by the conviction that Shakespeare's stories are not of one age, but for all time.

Linda Mickens is a CT Based sculptor and multidisciplinary artist whose work transforms reclaimed materials into reflections on memory, resilience, and the enduring legacy and lived experience of African Americans, past and present.

Following a 30-year career as a newborn intensive care nurse, Mickens dedicated herself fully to her artistic practice, bringing the compassion, care, and humanity that defined her work in medicine to her sculptures. Primarily self-taught, she works with reclaimed wood, vintage washboards, paper, and found metal.

Drawing from personal experience, family history, and cultural memory, Mickens creates work that explores the complexity of the human experience. Guided by a deep belief in art's power to preserve memory, inspire healing, and spark conversation, her sculptures hold space for sorrow and celebration, injustice and hope, loss and love.

Her work is held in the permanent collection of the River Road African American Museum in Louisiana and has been exhibited nationally, including at the Southampton African American Museum, City Gallery in New Haven, and Martha's Vineyard. She is a recipient of the 2025 MASS MoCA Fellowship, a 2024 Bitsie Clark Fund and Mellon Foundation grant, and a finalist in the 39th Chelsea International Fine Art Competition.

Titus Kaphar is a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and installation artist whose work interrogates what history chooses to show — and what it actively conceals. Born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he received a BFA from San Jose State University and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, and has lived and worked in New Haven ever since. His practice transforms familiar images from the Western art historical canon — cutting, obscuring, rolling, and repainting them — to surface the erased presences of Black people and challenge the legacies of colonialism embedded in the history of portraiture. His work has appeared in solo exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PS1, and the National Portrait Gallery, and is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others. In 2020, his painting Analogous Colors appeared on the cover of TIME. He is the recipient of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2018 co-founded NXTHVN — a nonprofit arts incubator and fellowship program in New Haven's Dixwell neighborhood — to accelerate the careers of emerging artists and curators of color through mentorship, studio space, professional development, and cross-sector collaboration. In 2024, he wrote and directed Exhibiting Forgiveness, a semi-autobiographical feature film. He lives in New Haven with his family.

Candyce “Marsh” John is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut. Her work explores identity, memory, vulnerability, and the relationships we build with ourselves, one another, and the spaces we inhabit. Working across painting, murals, textiles, tattooing, and mixed media, Marsh uses each medium as a different language to tell stories rooted in lived experience.

Deeply rooted in New Haven, much of her public work reflects the people, stories, and communities that continue to shape her practice. Her work is driven by curiosity rather than convention, often asking how people carry love, grief, resilience, and history in both the body and the everyday objects around them. Whether creating intimate studio work or large-scale public art, Marsh is interested in making work that invites people to pause, reflect, and recognize something of themselves.

Alongside her studio practice, Marsh is an educator and community artist who believes creativity can be a tool for connection, healing, and self-discovery. Through workshops, public projects, and collaborations, she continues to create spaces where art feels accessible and deeply human.

Marsh describes her work as “an unapologetically blaque nuance of love, loss, and liberty.”

Born and raised in New Haven, Charlie Grady has spent his life moving between two worlds — law enforcement and the arts — with equal dedication and distinction. He began his career as a police officer in 1982, becoming the first Black motorcycle officer and first Black detective in the Hamden Police Department, before going on to serve as a federal task force investigator with the Connecticut State Police Narcotics Unit, the DEA, and the FBI. Throughout his law enforcement career, he was also working as a professional musician and stage, television, and film actor, appearing in productions including Guiding Light, All My Children, and Law & Order. After retiring from law enforcement, he served as Connecticut's first FBI Community Outreach specialist and helped launch Project Longevity, New Haven's anti-gun violence initiative. In 2019, he co-wrote, directed, and produced Her Time, a play exploring the challenges women face after incarceration, produced by the nonprofit Hangtime — a healing space for ex-offenders that Grady founded and runs in New Haven, Bridgeport, Hartford, and Waterbury. For Grady, art and justice have never been separate endeavors.