Angela Kariotis

Angela Kariotis is an “artist as public servant”. She is an educator, award-winning playwright, and Director of the Whyman Center for Transformative Learning at Brookdale Community College. She believes the practices artists use every day—deep listening, curiosity, collaboration, imagination, and shared creation—are also the practices that help people, institutions, and communities thrive. Guided by this philosophy, Angela designs experiences that cultivate creativity, courage, compassion, and collaboration as essential practices of leadership.

At Brookdale, she has championed innovative initiatives including the Engaged Pedagogy Faculty Working Group, Open Doors Mentorship Initiative, co-produced Civility Week, Faculty Fellows Program, and institution-wide practices that strengthen teaching, leadership, civic engagement, and student success. Beyond higher education, she serves as Founding Teaching Artist, Curriculum Director, and Lead Facilitator of Walking the Beat, a nationally recognized arts education initiative that uses theater, media literacy, restorative practice, and civic dialogue to strengthen democracy, prevent violence, and build cultures of care. Walking the Beat is supported by NJ’s Office of the Attorney General and National Endowment of the Arts.

Angela’s writing appears in Musing in the Margins, Poetic People Power: Three Spoken Word Shows for Social Change, Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis, and Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally, and she is the recipient of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Playwriting, the National Performance Network Creation Fund Award, the Tennessee Williams Theater Fellowship, and numerous honors recognizing her contributions to education, the arts, and civic leadership. She was also selected as a featured participant in the Acosta Institute’s Wounded Healers Portrait Series & Podcast, recognizing leaders whose work advances healing-centered education and community transformation.

Angela believes everyone needs to be an artist right now—not because everyone will create art, but because creativity, empathy, imagination, and collaboration are essential to the future of leadership and democracy.