Faculty Spotlight: Lisa Kindall
Lisa Kindall has been teaching theater at the Blake campus Lower School for three years. She has 15 years of previous experience teaching all aspects of theater arts at the elementary, middle and high school levels. Currently, Kindall is also resident artist and education director at the Stages Theatre Company in Hopkins where she collaborates with teachers from a variety of schools to use theater arts as a means to enhance and expand learning experiences in a variety of interdisciplinary subject areas. For example, Stages theater arts residencies include topics like Pathways to Literacy, Connecting with History, Anti-bullying and Conflict Resolution, and Improvisation and Playmaking. Kindall also spent two years working with students in fourth through eighth grade at the FAIR School, collaborating with language arts teachers to introduce students to Shakespeare sonnets to help demystify Shakespeare for younger students.
Kindall enjoys working with young people and observing and encouraging the emergent artist in them. She finds theater can provide space and opportunity for students to find their own voice, on and off the stage, and that theater can be a catalyst in their social and emotional development. She believes that everyone has something to express and a compelling story to tell, and that with children, this can be unvarnished in comparison with adults. She finds that we are changed by the stories we hear and tell, as individuals and as a society. Theater allows us to remove the ordinary day-to-day cultural lens we wear and see other cultures, experiences and values. The kinesthetic experience of stepping into someone else’s shoes can help us experience the emotional connections in our own lives in a deeper way.
Kindall works with young Blake students each year, with increasingly progressive amounts of collaboration from the students. The culmination of everyone’s efforts is the fifth grade play. In third grade, students are exposed to a variety of skills, including performing for parents. In fourth grade, her students create original material, and, finally, in fifth they learn to handle the traditional script and rehearsal process.
Kindall obtained her bachelor’s degree in English and drama at Pepperdine University in California, and her MFA in acting at the University of California in Los Angeles. She has a 19-year-old daughter and 15-year-old twins, all who are seriously involved in the arts. And of course, she acts! She was last seen in the Red Eye Theater’s production of “Have you Seen Steve Steven” and “Sight Unseen” at the Sabes Jewish Community Center. Previous roles include Miss Clavell in “Madeline’s Christmas,” Isabella in “Measure for Measure,” and Kate Keller in “The Miracle Worker” at Stages Theatre Company.
