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About Us

The Children

Snow City Arts brings our programs to the patients of Rush University Children's Hospital and John H. Stroger Hospital of Cook County, and soon to young patients in hospitals across Chicago. Snow City Arts serves children of all ages, but most students are between the ages of 8 and 18 years old. More than three quarters of the children we work with are minorities and on public aid. About half of our children use English as their second language.

 

Many of these children were good or exceptional students before their need for hospitalization. Now, most are failing classes as they have been in and out of the hospital for months or even years. Snow City Arts works with these children to boost their confidence levels, stimulate their minds, and teach them that they are a contributing member to their community's cultural dialogue.

Artists-in-Residence

Snow City Arts in the innovator in bringing the arts to Chicago’s hospitalized children. 


Our staff is comprised of artists, musicians, writers, photographers, and filmmakers drawn from Chicago's deep cultural pool. By working side-by-side with local arts organizations, performance groups, music ensembles, and prominent universities, we help ensure our children are learning from Chicago's brightest artistic minds.


Our Artists-In-Residence are:

Snow City Arts was founded in 1998 through a grant from Ford Motor Company with a commitment to improve comprehensive healthcare for hospitalized children by providing them with the educational outlets they definitively lack due to their need for treatment, and by broadening the community educated in the arts and culture.


Being seriously ill means friends and school are replaced by machines and hospital.  We use the arts to springboard them back toward their daily lives, and work to keep them as academically in-step with their healthy peers as possible during hospitalization.  All our workshops are benchmarked against 159 age- and skill level-appropriate state and federal learning standards.


Since our inception we have taught nearly 15,000 children.  In 2010 alone, we provided 4,014 hours of one-on-one instruction to 1,560 children, conducted 3,780 workshops, and through a unique partnership with Chicago Public Schools, submitted the children’s work for credit at over 250 schools.


Snow City Arts has partnered with numerous community organizations including the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Columbia College Chicago, SMART Museum, The University of Illinois Chicago, Young Chicago Authors, and many more.

 

Our children's work has been featured at the Chicago International Children's Film Festival, Chicago Children's Humanities Festival, and at the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition, their work has been recognized in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, and on every major television network.

 

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois honored Snow City Arts as the corporation's Community Organization of the Year. Simultaneously, Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago honored Snow City Arts Foundation as its "Innovative Program of the Year." It was the first time in the more than 100-year history of the hospital the award was given to an outside agency.


Underscoring the importance of our programming, The White House and the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities honored Snow City Arts in 2007 with the prestigious Coming Up Taller Award, recognizing Snow City Arts as one of the 15 best youth programs in the United States.  Additionally, the National Endowment for the Arts recognized us for our “outstanding arts in healthcare” programs and profiled Snow City Arts as a national Best Practices organization.

 

Snow City Arts is currently the only program of its kind in Chicago.

Every year, Snow City Arts works with enough sick kids to fill nearly three elementary schools, bringing the classroom to children who miss school because of illness.
Mikey Peterson is a Filmmaker-in-Residence at the Stroger Hospital of Cook County. He is a video/audio artist and singer/songwriter who actively performs and exhibits in galleries and clubs nationally and internationally. He also teaches video/audio art, filmmaking and music to elementary and high school students at the Marwen Foundation, Intonation Music Workshop and Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education. 
 
Lara Golan our Musician-in-Residence at Rush, is a pianist, composer and songwriter who received her Masters degree in Music Composition from Northwestern University.  She teaches piano, theory and composition privately and has written music for a variety of commercial and theatrical productions.  Her score for Redmoon Theater's production of Dr. Egg and the Man With No Ear was nominated for a Jeff Award in 2009.  
 
Jonathan Stein is an abstract painter and printmaker, as well as being an art educator who has been working with Snow City Arts since 2007. His artwork has been shown in galleries in New York and Chicago, and in Miami at the Art Miami international art exhibition. He is an Illinois Arts Council grant recipient, and is represented by the NavtaSchulz Gallery in Chicago, Illinois. As an educator Jonathan has been working in the Kraft Artabounds Studio program at the Chicago Children's Museum since 2004.
 
Eric Elshtain is a homemaker with a PhD from the University of Chicago.  His poetry, reviews and interviews have been published in such journals as the Notre Dame Review, McSweeney's, American Letters & Commentary, among many others.  His book, Here In Premonition, was published in 2006; he also has several chapbooks.  Additionally, Eric is the editor of the on-line poetry press Beard of Bees.
 
Bernie McGovern is a puppet designer, art director, animator, illustrator, and graphic novelist. His theatrical adventures have brought him into the company of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Neo-Futurists, Dog & Pony, and Sansculottes Theater. Between bouts of theatrical frenzy, Bernie spends his free time lovingly chipping away at his epic graphic novel in progress An Army of Lovers Will Be Beaten, leaving xeroxed mini's and ten foot paintings in his wake. He holds a BFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art.
 
Ronnie Kuller is a Musician-in-Residence at Stroger Hospital of Cook County, and a faculty member a both Sherwood Community Music School at Columbia College and at the Old Town School of Folk Music. She received her B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and went on to receive her teaching credential from the American Montessori Society. She is now a multi-instrumentalist performing in many capacities and various collaborations, and is a member of Mucca Pazza, Chicago's premier circus punk marching band.
 
Michael Schield ~ Executive Director


Joining the staff in September 2011, Mr. Schield most recently served as president of the Schield Family Foundation, which provided strategic philanthropy to education, the arts, health care, social services and the environment.  He has an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and an undergraduate degree from Brown University.

 

Board of Directors

OFFICERS


Peter Schmitz, President

     President and CEO  |  Astyx, Inc.


Cathy Skala, Vice President

     Vice President IT, Renal  |  Baxter Healthcare Corporation


Steve Ryan, Treasurer

     Senior Vice President & Division Manager, Corporate Banking Group

     Northern Trust Company


Kate Neisser, Immediate Past President

     Community Leader / Philanthropist


DIRECTORS - AT - LARGE


Amy Bossov

     Chief YES Woman |  YES Promotions


Dr. Keith Boyd

     Associate Chair, Education - Pediatrics  |  Rush Children’s Hospital


Dr. Tariq Butt

     Chief Deputy Medical Officer  |  Access Community Health Network


Andreas Hecht

     Co-Founder and General Partner  |  Spot It Out


Deborah Jackson

     Founding Partner  |  Arrow Payments


Marta Kazmierczak

     Broker Associate  |  Prudential Rubloff Properties


John Lemaster

     Channel Sales Manager  |  ImageTag


Mary Jo lamparski

     Chief Advancement Officer  |  Envision Unlimited


Bill Loumpouridis

     President and CEO  |  EDL Consulting


Dr. Kamana Mbekeani

     General and Critical Care Surgeon  |  Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center


Kristy Peterson

     Director of Education  |  Smart Museum of Art


Nabeela Rasheed, Ph.D., ESQ.

     Partner  |  McAndrews, Held & Malloy

Dan Kerr-Hobert, Theatre Artist-in-Residence, is a former fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library and an alum of The Theatre School at DePaul University, Dan is a company member of Blair Thomas and Company, Artistic Director of Sans-culottes Theater, and a regular collaborator with the Chicago Neofuturists.  As a renowned director, deviser, performer, and puppet designer, his work has been seen throughout the United States at venues such as the MCA,The Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Garage at Steppenwolf, The Pritzker Pavillion, The Storefront Theatre, and Dad’s Garage in Atlanta.  Additionally, he works as an arts educator through CAPE and the Theatre School at DePaul University.
 
Allison Spicer is a Visual Artist-in-Residence at Rush University and Stroger Hospital of Cook County.  She is an exhibiting 2D artist in Chicago who works primarily in traditional drawing (graphite) and painting (gouache and oils) mediums.  Allison did her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan and graduate work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  She has been a teaching artist since 2002, developing her pedagogy at Detroit and Chicago Public Schools, the Smart Museum, MCA, Marwen, Hyde Park Arts Center, and Street Level Youth Media. 
 

Administration

Sadia Uqaili ~ Director of Artistic Programming


Lindsay Potter ~ Director of Academic Programming


Jason Lazott ~ Director of Development


Mikayah Fox ~ Office Manager

Paul Sznewajs, Founder

While volunteering as a writer-in-residence at the acclaimed New Horizons program at Children's National Medical Center (Washington, DC) and at Children's Hospital of the King's Daughter's (Norfolk, VA) the seed that would be become Snow City Arts was planted -- to use arts as the springboard to learning and engage hospitalized children unable to attend school due to illness.  In 1998, upon relocating to Chicago with his wife,  he founded the Snow City Arts to serve Chicago's underprivileged children.


After 13 years at the helm of his organization, Paul “retired” from Snow City Arts to become the founding Executive Director of Ingenuity, Inc.  This Chicago-based arts education service organization, which was the organizational byproduct of the Chicago Arts Learning Initiative, provides infrastructure and support to assist schools, arts organizations, and policy makers with meeting the challenge of preparing young students today.