The School of Making Thinking challenges disciplinary conventions of art-making, thinking, and living. 

VISION
We envision a world where the arts and radical pedagogy play a key role in shepherding the social justice and economic changes most needed in our time. In this world, a great diversity of artists -- including BIPOC, LGBTQ+, lower income, rural, diversely abled, and parents of children -- are supported with the community and critical thinking resources they need to grow their creative practices and amplify their cultural impact. 

MISSION
SMT creates immersive artist residencies and arts programming responsive to community needs and in pursuit of equity, justice and sustainability. We employ radical pedagogy and strategic program design to shape our gatherings and to holistically support artists and thinkers in their practices.

Our program asks: How does art deepen thought and provoke questioning? How is thinking enacted through creative mediums? And how can an environment be structured or resist structuring in such a way that these questions can not only be asked, but be lived as well? 

SMT was founded in 2011 and is a federal nonprofit 501c3.

Staff

Sophie Traub
​Interim Director

Board of Directors

Akeema-Zane
Raven Cassell
Josephine Decker
Jaimes Mayhew
Matt Pearson
Naima Ramos-Chapman
Liz Clayton Scofield

​Founders, Alumni Staff & Emeritus Board

Sophie Traub 
Interim Director

Sophie Traub is a queer performing artist and performance creator with extensive strategic, artistic leadership and facilitation experience through their work designing and running residencies for The School of Making Thinking since 2013. Sophie is invested in impact-focused arts programming, facilitating individual and group transformation through creative processes towards social change.  Sophie completed their Masters in Theatre and Performance Studies from York University in Toronto in 2019, focusing on the politics of cultural production and group dynamics in collaboration. In recent years, Sophie was an Associate Curator for the Canadian National Arts Centre’s Cycle on Climate Change, and worked with ToasterLab on GROUNDWORKS Performance Project at Alcatraz led by Dancing Earth, the California-based pan-Indigenous dance company. Since 2019, Sophie is a lead contributing artist to Beyond Boom & Bust, a performance company with a mandate of cultivating economic and social resilience through performance in rural southern Oregon, where they now live. Sophie has trained extensively in movement theatre techniques such as Viewpoints, Suzuki, and Grotowski, and holds a long background of working in experimental devised theatre productions and in film in the US and Canada, to much acclaim.

​​Akeema-Zane
Board Chair, Board Member

​Akeema-Zane is an artist and researcher whose practice centers the literary, music, cinematic and performance traditions. She has been artist-in-residence, student, fellow and performer at Groundation Grenada, Cave Canem, The Maysles Documentary Center, Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, and The School of Making Thinking. At The School of Making Thinking, she was a part of the 2018 Immersion 2.0 cohort, where she designed her first Virtual Reality experience which featured herself. She is currently serving on the Board of Directors of The School of Making Thinking. As a native New Yorker she is proud to have spent many years working at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture where she worked as an archival curriculum researcher for her last post there. Collaboration is a major tenet of the artists’ practice and one of her collaborative works “Sonic Escape Routes: Shall We Fly Or Shall We Resist” was featured in the 59th Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her published writings include: There’s a Monopoly on Change, Interlude, When Money Can’t Buy You Home and Basil Grows from Mother Earth.

Raven Cassell
Board Member

Raven Cassell is a theatre artist; an actor, writer, producer and educator based in New York with her fingers dipped in African diasporic communities in Africa and Latin America. Her work lies at the junction of diaspora studies, visual art and storytelling. She's interested in investigating and experimenting with the way we learn, engage and produce stories. 

Raven is currently in development for her debut play, For the Love of Jazz (a jazzical) for which she is starring in and co-producing. She’s earned a BFA in Dramatic Arts with concentration in Acting and Writing from The New School for Drama and her residencies include Dramatic Need, South Africa; Thread, Senegal; and The School of Making Thinking, NY, USA. She’s performed in The Black Joy Project, JAGfest 2.0, BRIClabs, The Fire This Time Festival, NY International Fringe Festival and other self-produced works.
 
“The theater has been a vehicle of transformation, the grounds where I could confront, explore and transgress my intersectional identities.”  
​– Raven Cassell
 

Josephine Decker
​Vice Chair, Board Member

Photo by Eric Rudd/Indiana University

Josephine Decker is a filmmaker committed to collaboration, poetry, play, cinema and the new genres and personal transformations that emerge from their mixing. Her work focuses on women’s interiority and sexuality.  Her feature film Shirley, starring Elisabeth Moss and Odessa Young, won Sundance 2020’s U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Auteur Filmmaking and centers around two women whose subtly erotic friendship is both liberating and destructive.  Josephine’s work tends to bend the space between imagination and reality. Her feature film Madeline’s Madeline follows an unstable teenager as she is seduced into a large role in a theater company.  The film’s visceral cinematography, editing and sound design thrust the audience into the ever-shifting first-person perspective of her main character Madeline. Madeline’s Madeline, scripted through a devised process with ten actors, played Sundance, Berlinale and scores of festivals worldwide, was hailed as a “mind-scrambling masterpiece” and was nominated for Best Picture at IFP’s Gotham Awards and for two Independent Spirit Awards. Said to be ushering in a “new grammar of narrative” by The New Yorker, Josephine premiered her first two narrative features at the Berlinale Forum 2014 to critical acclaim. Her newest project The Sky is Everywhere (A24/Apple, adapted from Jandy Nelson's YA novel) will come out Valentine's Day 2022.  Josephine also explores collaborative storytelling via TV directing, documentary making, performance art, accordion-playing, acting, teaching at places like CalArts and Princeton University and leading artist residencies with the School of Making Thinking.  She was present at the very first SMT session in 2011, and that session and her subsequent involvement in SMT has been life- and art-changing for her.  It has helped her trust making work in a messy process involving lots of people. She has written every film she's written at SMT or through collaboration with the SMT community.  She wishes she could do more end climate change and mass incarceration. 

Jaimes Mayhew 
​Treasurer, Board Member

Jaimes Mayhew makes participatory, interdisciplinary work that addresses identity and how it is expressed through land use, speculation and ecology. From installation, photography and video to fiber art and performance, Mayhew’s work is conceptually tied together through experimentations of  queering relationships between humans, places and things. Mayhew has exhibited nationally and internationally, and reviews of their work have appeared in Hyperallergic, Art Papers, and The Creators Project, among others.  An article about Mayhew’s work titled “Performing Trans Ontology: The Body (and Body of Work) of Jaimes Mayhew” was published in the academic journal Feminist Frontiers in late 2020. Mayhew holds an MFA in Intermedia and Digital Art from University of Maryland Baltimore County and a BA in Film from Emerson College. He currently teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in the Studio Art program at American University. 

Naima Ramos-Chapman
Board Member

Naima Ramos-Chapman works to tell stories of transformation and understated bravery by rendering the juxtaposition of psycho-spiritual realities we cannot see alongside the normalized brutalities “hiding” in everyday life.

Her first short, And Nothing Happened, explored the psychological aftermath of a sexual assault and premiered at the 2016 Slamdance film festival. Her second short, Piu Piu, a meditation on frontier justice and victimhood ontology, premiered at Blackstar Film Festival in 2018. In 2017, she became a Sundance Institute screenwriter intensive fellow. In 2018, she wrote, directed, acted, and edited for the Peabody award-winning Random Acts of Flyness (HBO). In 2020, as part of a multi-media installation produced by Aljazeera Contrast, she wrote and directed Still Here, a virtual reality experience about the obstacles black women face who re-enter society after being kidnapped and traumatized by the prison industrial complex. It premiered in the New Frontiers section of the Sundance Film Festival. In 2020, she also co-produced, and story edited the tv series Betty (HBO), a coming-of-age story of a diverse group of young women navigating their lives through the predominantly male world of skateboarding.
​
Naima is currently in the metaphorical woods developing several projects in the docu-narrative hybrid space that center BIPOC femmes taking back their power after surviving hierarchal abuses internalized by the dominant social order of white supremacy and toxic masculinity.

Matt Pearson
Secretary, Board Member

Matt Pearson is an environmental designer and musician whose projects range from performance to cultural exhibitions in science, beauty, art, editorial, and technology.
His work spans various settings and scales, including both civic and commercial, object and environment. He strives to convey intent and emotion through formal excellence in his work.
 
Matt currently serves as a physical spatial designer for RAANY, a multidisciplinary design firm specializing in exhibitions, museums, and educational environments, developing a new natural history museum and educational center in Abu Dhabi. Prior to that, Matt successfully collaborated with neurological researchers at University of Louisville to develop a seating device for children with spinal cord injury and win commercialization funding from NIH. For many years, Matt has consulted as an immersive scenic and interactive designer for HBO, Sundance Film Fest, Complex Magazine, Domino Park Brooklyn, Toyota, Cornell Tech, Adidas, Cucalorus Film Festival, and more. 
A trained singer and pianist of many styles, Matt performs with small groups specializing in the musical techniques of jazz through gospel and other devotional traditions. He teaches voice and music to children through the Maryland Fine Arts after school African Cultural Enrichment (ACE) program.

Liz Clayton Scofield
Board Member

Liz/Clayton Scofield (they/them) is a nondisciplinary artist dabbling in a variety of media to find meanings that fall through the cracks of specialization. They engage in a process of transformational play across media. Their work includes (but is not limited to) performance, video, poetry, and essay exploring how to being, not-knowing, ambiguity, and refusal. They strive towards models of artistic engagement that prioritize world-building, self-making (or -being?), radical-imagining, connection, and process over production. 
 
Their work has been featured in publications including Number, Nashville Arts, Wussy, and Dinner Bell. They have performed and exhibited nationally. They have been an artist-in-residence with Cucalorus, the School of Making Thinking, Lazuli, and the JHU-MICA Film Centre. They received an MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington, in digital art, and a BA from Vanderbilt University. They are currently based in Iowa City, Iowa, studying poetry at The Writers’ Workshop and serving on the board of directors of SMT. They are 70 percent water, 100 percent heart.