Our team of psychosocial therapy artists deploy design drawing, flex dancing, and spoken word to help clients work through challenging questions.
They operate in Matchaparty Tea Houses, a unique opportunity for neighborhood development.
Carl Belizaire
Carl Belizaire is a professor, dance performer, and entrepreneur. He teaches math at Baruch College where he is a graduate in Entrepreneurship/Small Business Management. Carl spent years pursuing his love for dance and has built himself an extensive background through the performing world. Self taught in "Flexing," which originated from the Jamaican dance style "Bruk-Up" he has performed on the television station BCAT on the program "Flex in Brooklyn." The technique incorporates waving, gliding, pausing (pop locking), connecting (tutting), animation, lyricism, storytelling and musicality.
Carl's mastery of Flexing has allowed him to go professional and he has since worked as an instructor at Sports and Arts in School Foundation, an afterschool program geared towards enriching the lives of youths thorugh academics and extracurricular activities. Carl is featured in films such as "Girl Walk All Day," produced by Jacob Krupnick, "Attitude 3" produced by Isaac Goodwine, the documentary "Flex is Kings" produced by Diedre Schoo, and the opera "Kwaidan" by Yara Travieso and Jerome Begin. In addition, he manages his own group of dancers called Street's Finest and has performed at the WIld Project and the Brooklyn Museum. Carl has written a number of books on motivation, and when asked what drives him, he responds, "my desire to succeed in life and be able to support my family."
ALISON BARTLETT
Alison Bartlett is an architectural designer in Mexico City. She holds a double masters degree in Architecture and Interior Architecture from the University of Oregon. She is compelled by architectural interventions that respond to socio-economical, contextual and political forces that spatially define intimate human experiences.
She has helped facilitate Matchparty in New York and in collaboration with the HOPES conference at the University of Oregon.
YUKA DISCOBEANS
Yuka first opened and managed the “Disco Beans” gallery and cafe in Osaka. After three years she relocated to Melbourne and re-opened Disco Beans as a vegan-friendly cafe/restaurant. Disco Beans became a cultural institution in Melbourne during its seven years. She has experience in managing a restaurant in partnership with Spiral Foods, Australia’s major organic food distributor.
Yuka specializes in creating japanese tea ceremony gatherings « chaji » She offer her japanese tea ceremony,unique dishes and homemade fermented foods at the chaji. Yuka has done tea ceremony in melbourne mainly also sydney,indonesia,hawaii. Skilled at creating nourishing meals in little time, she offers cooking classes with a focus on developing working women’s skill for creating quick, healthy meals.
Another of Yuka’s educational programs is aimed at high schools. There she teaches teens how to make their own ‘character bento’ lunch boxes with flair.
Yuka is a performer and musician currently making recipe videos for Spiral Foods, combining food workshops with the Japanese Tea Ceremony, making her own unrefined saké and developing products using saké lees.
ALYSSA LINKLETTER
Alyssa is a perpetual student and a holistic healing professional. She is currently a master's student pursuing licensure in counseling psychology at Alliant University. She is also a certified life coach with a focus on positive psychology and mindfulness. She gives people skills to help them turn inwards, realize their purpose, and transform their ideals into reality.
Her work focuses on the integration of the body, mind, spirit, and creative imagination. Her ambition is to guide people in attending to all of these areas in order to gain a sense of wholeness and facilitate meaningful change. Alyssa is passionate about packaging holistic, integrative interventions into easily accessible and implementable activities that are transformative in one’s quality of happiness and success in life.
Tameel Marshall curates psychological environments through music, word, and fashion. Recognizing our schizophrenic society, he aims to create spaces that bring people closer to their authentic self. He has worked for the Brownsville Community Justice Center since 2013, helped to design the Osborn Plaza, collaborated with major advertising design firms with the goal of reducing violence, and offers individual counseling to dozens of youth in Brownsville.
With the Matcha Party program, fashion styling, critical workshops, narrative design, and the Delicious Memories program with the Claus Meyer Melting Pot, he reveals the complex nature of often misunderstood environments and people.
TAmeel Marshall
jennifer paulino
Jennifer Paulino is a junior full stack developer and front end web developer who uses creative technical solving to create social and interpersonal dynamics. She is lead instructor at the Knowledge House in the Bronx, teaching web development. As a self-taught technologist, Paulino learned various computer languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python) and their frameworks/libraries (Bootstrap, Django, Angular, jQuery) to become a full time software developer. Paulino knows how to work with people of all ages from the ground up to address technical challenges creatively. She is born and bred in Manhattan and the Bronx.
cristal rojas
Cristal Rojas is an interspecies communicator who works with photography, word, and music to curate interspecies understanding. Working primarily with dogs and people in Brooklyn and Manhattan she not only identifies elements of the relationships between humans and animals, animals and animals, and humans and humans, but she captures these dynamics with her visual art which seeks to dissect and rearrange existing hierarchies of species and gender power. Rojas is a Washington Heights, Manhattan native with strong ties to neighborhoods around NYC. As part of the Matchaparty project, Rojas uses poetry and visual art to reach for hidden elements of wilderness embedded within the everyday landscape of the city.
Sean Turner
Turner was the face of Mayor Bloomberg's young man's initiative from 2013-2014. During this time, he was an Americorps member implementing Sandy recovery in Red Hook and Coney Island. Every year he participates in the Martin Luther King day of service. He has painted over 14 murals with Groundswell; 4 in Brownsville, and 10 elsewhere across New York City. He believes in designing restaurants from decor to menu, field to plate, emphasizing a diversity of international cuisine. Try his stromboli. He has been creating holistic food systems from community gardens to family gatherings for four years, since he has become the primary caregiver for his mother, suffering from diabetes.
He believes art and design are an essential part of treatment and food systems. Born in Brookdale hospital, Turner is a Brownsville resident of the New York City Housing Authority.
Alan Waxman
Alan Waxman has been doing Yabunouchi tea ceremony for the last ten years. Through his practice he creates ecosocial design for health equity and cultural resiliency. By operating in locations of fragility in space and time, he aims to bring people together to reopen critical narratives. His current Urban Rhythms studios assess urban patterns by way of participatory engagement, setting up emic spectrums of data derived from meaning for cultural insiders. Resident participants, those who have the most to gain and the most to lose, collaborate to make real time interventions through events, dance, and environmental change. As "Neighborhood Doctor," Waxman deploys ecosocial design in Brownsville, Brooklyn NY and Kyoto, Japan, where he serves as an instructor with the University of Oregon in their Myoshinji Zen temple based urban design program. In 2015, he and Sang Cho produced New York City's first Health Impact Assessment with a group of elder residents in Brownsville. Working on projects primarily for NYC Parks, Waxman works for Quennell Rothschild and Partners, a leading landscape architecture firm for public space design. He was an inaugural Forefront Fellow in 2016 with the Urban Design Forum in New York City.
Callie wheeler
Callie Wheeler is a Venture Catalyst - an instigator that makes things happen. Focusing primarily on social and interactive experiences she directs her energies towards supporting artists and entrepreneurs, working with them to kickstart, refine and implement their visions - creating lasting value and self expansion. Currently, Callie works as a Product Manager of mobile experiences at Prezi, the conversational presentation tool, in Budapest, Hungary. Having spent the last five years in San Francisco working for various digital experience companies as a User Experience Researcher and Product Manager, she has honed her skills in cultivating action before the move to Budapest.
As a researcher at social shopping site ModCloth Callie utilized diary studies and contextual inquiry to provide guidance to product direction and strategy. While working with Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) on a $2.5B project to replace all existing train cars, she facilitated participatory design, rapid prototyping, and community discussions with non-native english speakers and persons with disabilities to provide insight and feedback on train car and communication systems design. Using the tools and experience of Product Management, Callie supports experiential projects across the world from Pikkpack Shoes in Budapest to MatchaParty in New York City. She also regularly holds Product Office Hours for anyone who has an idea and would like to take it forward.
