Culture & Community | International Festival of Arts & Ideas | Arts & Culture | New Haven Green
Shelley Quiala, Carlah Esdaile Bragg, Dr. Pamela Monk Kelley and Sophie Edelstein at the Hill Neighborhood Festival earlier this year. Alisha Martindale File Photo.
A cultural connector and leader in the city’s arts scene is leaving the International Festival of Arts & Ideas after helping steer the organization through a global pandemic and period of growth in the greater New Haven community. As she departs, a professional go-between will step in to bridge the gap—and push the festival on toward its 30th anniversary season.
The festival made that announcement Monday morning, as Executive Director Shelley Quiala charts her return to the Twin Cities to care for her mother. As she steps down after four years, festival Board Chair and Rev. Kevin Ewing will serve as interim director. Quiala will remain onboard in a more limited capacity as a senior artistic and development strategist.
This interim role is one Ewing knows well: he worked as an interim pastor at Center Church on the Green from 2016 to 2020 and United Church on the Green from 2022 to the end of last year. He has served on Arts & Ideas’ board for a total of 16 years, during which he has overseen multiple leadership transitions and an increasingly concerted effort to connect with the community.
“We’re thinking about: What do we actually want to be? What do we look for? What's out there? Who’s out there?” Ewing said in a phone call Wednesday morning. “What gifts are we able to find and how do they fit into the New Haven culture?”
Quiala began her tenure at the festival in August 2020, just weeks after the end of an all-virtual season in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Within months, she and team members were growing their mission with Covid-proofed holiday concerts and preparations for a hybrid season, with new collaborations that kept social distancing and pandemic precautions in mind.
Even as the festival kept much of its programming virtual in 2021 (several events also unfolded in person on the New Haven Green; read about those here), Quiala built a team that looked more like New Haven, collaborating with more community partners on everything from neighborhood festivals to storytelling to a new spotlight on AAPI voices.
As the festival made the return to in-person events, Quiala rolled out a season that increasingly fused local, national and international performers, with acts like Mical Teja and the Caribbean Heritage Festival and Dolores Huerta, Proyecto Cimarrón and Las Cafeteras. She listened when New Haveners called for a return to circus and puppetry, bringing L'homme Cirque, Air Temple Arts, The Seven Fingers and Anne Cubberly’s Giant Puppets over a series of years.
Working with the secretive and self-perpetuating Proprietors of the New Haven Green, she also launched Rhythm Exchange, a biweekly series that brought arts and culture to the New Haven Green during the fall months, weeks after the festival had ended. Last year and again this summer, the festival rolled out a series of live performances, new collaborations, bike and food tours, and box-office-shattering concerts, including jazz phenom Samara Joy.
During her time in New Haven, Quiala said, she’s been proudest of the festival’s continued effort to bring New Haven to the world, and the world to New Haven—sometimes in the span of a single evening. In the last four years, neighborhood festivals have continued to expand, with joyful celebrations in the Hill, Dixwell, Newhallville, Fair Haven and most recently West Hills/West Rock and Long Wharf.
Her work hasn’t gone unnoticed: the festival has been recognized by the Greater New Haven NAACP and the Elm City Freddy Fixer Parade Committee, as well as the Gateway Community College Foundation. In 2023, the Jamaican American Connection honored her as an “honorary Jamaican” during its fall gala, in part for her work in bringing the Caribbean festival downtown.
Rev. Kevin Ewing.
“In an organization, it's not a single person. It's a team,” she was quick to say in a phone call Monday. “It was accomplished by a group of people.”
“The things that mattered most to me were the things that were articulated to me when I came—deeper connection with the community, work with neighborhood leadership, the expansion of that work,” she added. “I’m really proud of the work that the team did in resisting this division between international and local. We are both. New Haven is both.”
Now, she said, Ewing is the right person to carry on that work. In addition to his 16 years of board leadership for the festival and time as an interim pastor, Ewing served as founder and director of Baobab Tree Studios and still works closely with the Neighborhood Leadership Program, an initiative of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven. He received an arts award for his work in 2017.
“He knows the festival, he knows the community, and he's done this kind of thing many times over,” Quiala said. In a day-to-day context, that looks like keeping track of the organization’s finances, supporting the staff, and acting as a go-between with staff, board, and community members, particularly those who are dedicated patrons and have long followed the festival.
Ewing said that the festival is also in the midst of its latest strategic planning process, which had initially envisioned Quiala at the head of the organization. “So now, that has to shift,” he said. While the board has received the name of several search firms—Quiala first came to the festival through a search from Arts Consulting Group or ACG—they have not yet launched a search.
Meanwhile, the festival will push on toward its 30th anniversary season, which kicks off with a Sept. 6 gala at the New Haven Lawn Club. As Quiala transitions to senior artistic and development strategist, she plans to continue advising festival staff and help with programming, as well as “making sure that that narrative connects to the development strategy,” she said. She plans to be in New Haven roughly once a month even after relocating to Minneapolis.
“The title suggests that it’s not hands on, and it's absolutely hands on,” she said.
Inner-City News Editor and WNHH-LP radio host Babz Rawls-Ivy praised Quiala's work, noting how deeply and genuinely she engaged with New Haveners across the city. For Rawls-Ivy, who grew up in New Haven and now lives in its Newhallville neighborhood, that's extremely rare—and something that other nonprofit leaders can learn from.
She was especially excited to see the evolution of the neighborhood festivals, each of which took on their own personality and flavor. For her, it was a testament to how Quiala would show up, with a willingness to listen and assure community members that the festival was for everyone.
"She is going to be ridiculous missed," Rawls-Ivy said. "She took this from a festival that happens in New Haven to a festival that happens with New Haven."
"I will forever be grateful for her," she added. "You rarely see people parachute in and take to the city the way that she did. It's such a good example for how others can pay attention."