Teaching Artists

Leslie K. Gray

Leslie K. Gray is a visual artist, puppetry and theater designer and director whose work has been seen both locally and internationally at such places as The Music Center on Tour, The Skirball Cultural Center, The Getty Museum, Highways Performance Space, Ma Chere Artspace in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and El Museo Nacional in Montevideo, Uruguay. She teaches puppetry and art workshops for many community organizations and museums and is a credentialed K-12 Special Ed and Deaf Ed. teacher. At Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, she developed and leads online workshops where children and youth learn to make their own shadow puppets, lanterns, and vessels of hope, addressing their feelings and experiences during the pandemic. She has experience teaching all age levels and specializes in adapting techniques to different learning styles.

Riley Strom

Riley Strom is an oil painter from Los Angeles. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence, and earned her MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. In addition to her studio work, Riley has shared her talents with the community in CFAER’s “Loosening up With Ink” workshop, and she also oversees our new Drawing Lab which launched in January 2021. As an artist she thinks a lot about the relationship between an image and the world it is representing. How can a still image contain the complexity of a lived experience? In her paintings she wants to communicate the sense of energy, motion, and time that exists in living things. Her artistic process starts with observation. Music, people she meets, food, stories she’s told or read, found photographs, poetry, or pieces of trash are all potential subjects to paint. The paintings dip in and out of representation, figuration, and abstraction. She is interested to watch how her work is informed by her ever changing environment, mood, as well as the larger societal socio-economic and political circumstances.

Elizabeth Dallas

Elly Dallas is an artist and educator who grew up with her grandparents in NE Ohio. As a first generation college student, she earned her BFA in printmaking from Kent State University and later her MS degree in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Akron. Recently, she spends most of her free time embroidering, drawing, making papier-mâché sculptures, or participating in mail art exchange. Through her work, she thoughtfully explores storytelling and finds herself especially entranced by the repetition of making stitches. She believes that change can be made by sharing even the smallest of stories. She has experience teaching and making art alongside children, adults and senior citizens, with gratitude to learn about and teach towards others’ learning styles along the way. Her hope within her teaching practice is to promote wonder, play and exploration of new techniques and ideas that will outweigh the self judgement that sometimes holds us back from creating and sharing.