Levana Saxon is a facilitator, trainer and popular educator committed to supporting community-led change. She began using popular education and theater practices with children in her home town of Aptos, CA 20 years ago. Since then she has taught various forms of popular education and theater to educators, activists and students of all ages as well as co-founded two ongoing popular education projects. As a teenager she built giant puppets and performed with Art and Revolution and began studying and facilitating Theater of the Oppressed exercises and public interactive performances. As a youth activist, she served for two years as the U.S. Advisor to the United Nations Environment Programme Youth Advisory Council (now TUNZA), co-founded the Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Youth Alliance and organized and facilitated youth-led convenings including international JAMs with Youth for Environmental Sanity and the Alchemy of Peacebuilding with the Praxis Peace Institute.
Later (as an adult) she taught Ecopedagogy, an arts-based form of popular education for ecological justice at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and helped organize the 2nd annual World Education Forum while working with the Paulo Freire Institute. Within the Oakland Public schools system she served on the design team to start SEED, a small autonomous public school, taught theater and giant puppetry and organized events to celebrate teachers as a board member of the Mind Power Collective. As Education Coordinator with Rainforest Action Network, she helped organize and train for arts based actions with communities in West Virginia, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Brazil, and the Bay Area and developed curriculum for teaching about climate change. She then moved on to Youth in Focus to facilitate youth-led participatory action research projects addressing food, environmental and economic justice issues.
Currently, Levana works both independently and as a facilitator with Partners for Collaborative Change, which she co-founded. She also facilitates anti-racism trainings and dialogues with the White Noise Collective. Her B.A. in Interdisciplinary studies and Environmental Education is from the Friends World Program of Long Island University that brought her to work and study in Latin America, East Africa and Europe. She has a Masters in Education with a concentration in Participatory Theater from San Francisco State University.
CONTACT
Levana Saxon | Oakland | 510-501-8535 | levana.saxon@gmail.com