About Our Facilitator Lisa Martin hiking in Viru Raba Bog in Estonia
Summer 2019 Lisa
Martin has over 25 years of experience working with arts and
cultural organizations on both US coasts, as well as across
Europe. Lisa has
served as Executive Director of Silver Spring Town Center
Inc since November 2011. As the first Executive Director of
SSTCi (a 501c3), she has oversight of over 100 ongoing SSTCi
programs and events that take place throughout the year in
Downtown Silver Spring primarily at the Silver Spring Civic
Building and Veterans Plaza. These events include the Silver
Spring Blues Festival & Blues Week, the Harvest
Moon Festival, Tribute to America's Veterans Concert, as
well as SSTCi's Arts Salon and Civic Café, plus
performance series on Veterans Plaza, including Twilight
Tuesdays and Wednesday Night STARZ. Lisa has also
created a number of special events, as well as SSTCi's World
Bazaars two other popular programs: SSTCi's Film &
Lecture Series and SSTCi's SPARKLE "Senior
Programs Aimed at Re-Kindling Lifetime Engagement presented
in collaboration with Silver Spring Village. She has
over 25 years of experience working with arts and cultural
organizations and events, both domestically and abroad, including
the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, VSA Arts
International Festival in Washington, DC; San Diego
Opera, the San Diego Museum of Man, the Parnu
International Anthropology and Documentary Film Festival in
Estonia, as well as a wide variety of embassy events. She has
also worked in research and evaluation for museums, galleries,
science centers and historic sites. Lisa is a
Returned Peace Corps Volunteer having served as an English
Teacher in Estonia 96-98. She has served on boards related to
international development and cultural exchange, including the
international board of directors of Partners of the
Americas, and as president of the Returned Peace Corps
Volunteers of Washington DC. In 2013, as part of a Partners of
the Americas cultural exchange, she traveled to Brasilia on an
Education and Culture Program travel grant sponsored by the US
State Department. As part of this exchange, she gave several
presentations entitled Community Building Through the Arts
in Public Spaces, which details her work with SSTCi in particular
and creative placemaking in general. She has a
Master's Degree in Arts Management from American University,
a BS in Cultural Anthropology and BA in Journalism from San
Diego State University, as well as an Executive Certificate in
Facilitation from the Institute of Transformational
Leadership at Georgetown University. Lisa is recipient of the 2016 Montgomery County
Executive's Award for Excellence in the Arts &
Humanities for Community Leadership, and is a member of the
2017 Core Class of Leadership Montgomery. Lisa is an
avid traveler having visited over 30 countries and over 40 of the
50 states with a tendency to visit certain places of the world
over and over again where she has family and/or friends, or
simply a special connection. In her
spare time, she also enjoys visiting festivals and museums,
films, theatre, comedy writing, doing art (encaustic, mosaics
& collage), and singing in two choirs, including
the Washington International Chorus and
the Baltimore Washington Estonian Choir. |
