2025 Next Level Teaching Arts Panelists

Chiara Galimbert

Chiara Galimbert is originally from Italy, and currently residing in Chicago. Chiara is a disabled queer artist, writer, organizer, acupuncturist, immigrant, and former teen mother. They are committed to building collaborative spaces for community care and moving toward a collective embodied liberation in and out of movements for justice.

Chiara has been deeply involved in gender violence prevention, practicing healing justice, and creating politicized art for over two decades. They have written and spoken extensively about disability justice, politicized healing, and using art as a cultural tool for structural change. They are a politicized somatics practitioner in the lineage of Generative Somatics with a focus on generative conflict, childhood trauma recovery, and breaking multigenerational cycles of harm.

Sam Tower

Sam Tower (she/her) serves as the Executive Director of Bartol Foundation in Philadelphia, supporting arts and culture organizations and teaching artists with grants, developmental workshops, and trauma-informed practice training. As a cultural worker, she is focused on expanding arts access for families and young people, redistributing financial resources to artists and educators, and improving the living conditions of artists and the communities they serve. In 2018, Sam co-founded Ninth Planet, where she continues to serve as Co-Artistic Director, creating and producing original performances with people of color, women, queer and trans people in Philadelphia, and offering free arts programming in libraries and community art spaces designed to support the social and emotional development of babies and healthy attachment in families. Sam has created artistic cohort models for International Performing Arts for Youth, Headlong Performance Institute, and Cannonball Festival; and offered workshops and editorial articles for TYA/USA, ASSITEJ International, and WeeFestival.

Kerry Warren

Kerry Warren is a New York based actor, teaching artist, and former Co-Executive of the Teaching Artists Guild (TAG). She has served as a panelist for The Princess Grace Awards, NYC AIERoundtable and the Brooklyn Arts Council. She is a graduate of the Juilliard School where she received The President Polisi Prize for Artist as Citizen and recently received the NEXT GENERARTION award from the National Guild of Community of Arts Education. 

She has taught with Harlem Childrens Zone, Lincoln Center Education, GIRLBEHEARD, Peoples Theatre Project, The 52nd Street Project, EPIC Theatre, ArtsConnection, New York Theater Workshop and is a member of NYC Arts in Education Roundtable.