MISSION

Citizen Arts and Education is a non-profit arts organization committed to generating cultural dialogue through the creation of original artistic work. We believe in artists supporting artists at all stages of their development.

Meg Araneo

Co-Artistic Director

Meg Araneo is a Brooklyn-based theatre-maker and scholar whose work focuses on the intersection of performance and the history of neurological impairments. She embraces interdisciplinary work that places practice in conversation with histories and theories of performance. Meg has appeared as a performer in such works as Mosca [Fly] by Fabio Rubiano, The Pelican by August Strindberg, Woyzeck by George Buchner, and a stage adaption of Akira Kurosawa’s iconic film Rashomon. She has collaborated with jazz musician, poet, and visual artist Oliver Lake and composer Rob Reddy on the multi-disciplinary performance piece Interruption! presented at BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn. Meg launched Citizen Arts’s emerging artists program The Nest in 2022 Currently, she is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Theatre at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and an Adjunct Instructor of Drama at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She also serves as the Co-Producer of Programming at the Segal Theatre Center.

Rob Reddy

Co-Artistic Director

Rob Reddy formed his first ensemble in 1989 featuring legendary bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Pheeroan akLaff. Since then, he has worked almost exclusively as a band leader, with the exception of brief stints with Workman’s ensemble and Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society. He founded the Reddy Music label in 2006 and released A Hundred Jumping Devils, which earned him a Chamber Music America commission. His second release, Book of the Storm, which featured an all-star 19-piece ensemble, was commissioned by the Jerome Foundation and New York State Council of the Arts. It premiered at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. Rob has been awarded commissions and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Composers Forum, Meet the Composer, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the American Music Center, and the MAP Fund. He has received several residencies including at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center and BRIC Arts Media. Rob holds a BFA in Jazz from The New School and an MM in Music Composition from NYU.

Mia Cusianovic

Associate Producer and Associate Director of The Nest

Mia Cusianovic is a California-born Chilean-Croatian actor, musician, and theater-maker based in Brooklyn, New York. She recently graduated New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in Theatre with honors and an emphasis on Social Work. She spent her time there having studied at The Stella Adler Studio of Acting, ETW’s International Theater Workshop in Amsterdam, and the year-long pre-professional program, The Classical Studio. She is especially passionate about community-engaged work under the ethos that art has the collective power to move things — the capacity to invoke healing and change. She is interested life-affirming, human-centered storytelling with the desire to work with artists with a similar mission to leave the world a more connected, more beautiful, more whole place than we found it.