Jenna Gabriel
Washington, DC
Jenna Gabriel is an education consultant specializing in issues affecting equitable access to arts engagement for students with disabilities at the classroom, programmatic, and policy level. For the past 4 years, Ms. Gabriel has served as the Manager of Special Education at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where she oversaw education initiatives for students with disabilities and their teachers, including the annual VSA Intersections: Arts and Special Education Conference. In this role, she also acted as a facilitator for the Center's Ensuring the Arts for Any Given Child collective impact initiative, leading community-based strategic planning efforts to increase K-12 arts education across the country. Prior to joining the Center, Ms. Gabriel was based in Boston at IBA-Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, where she directed all K-12 youth development programs. In that capacity, she designed and supervised out-of-school-time programs for ELLs and struggling readers, mentoring programs for middle youth, and an arts-based social justice program for City of Boston youth—programming that was awarded the 2016 National Arts and Humanities Youth Programs Award, presented by Former First Lady Michelle Obama. Ms. Gabriel is the Founding Executive Director of Daytime Moon Creations, a nonprofit offering arts programs to children with disabilities now overseen by the Berklee Institute for Arts Education and Special Needs, and has led arts-based special education programming throughout New York City. She has conducted workshops and keynote sessions at numerous national conferences, including the NAEA and CEC Conventions, the Arts Better the Lives of Everyone (ABLE) Assembly, and the Americans for the Arts Convention, serves on advisory boards of the Berklee Institute for Arts Education and Special Needs and the National Children's Museum, and is a frequent contributor to blogs, journals, and other publications on issues affecting arts learning for students with disabilities. Ms. Gabriel holds a BFA with honors in Drama from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and studied Intellectual Disabilities and Autism at Teachers College, Columbia University before completing her Masters in Education at Harvard University.
