Breai Michele is a Baltimore native, community activist, teacher, dancer, and
cultural counselor. A Harvard graduate, Breai’s Master’s Thesis explored the
role of Hip-Hop as a religious and moral touchstone for African American
youth. During her time at Harvard Divinity School, Breai developed an
educational program called Youth Truth for Boston’s American Friends Service
Committee which was the precursor to her current work in Baltimore in its
focus on youth Arts programming as a locus for social change.
Since graduating HDS in 2002, Breai has worked in Baltimore City Schools
introducing students to African American history through the Arts. Over the
course of that time, she has written numerous Arts-Integration curricula
including The Corner and The Colony, which uses photojournalism to
investigate correlations between the European colonization of North America
and the occupation of street corners by drug dealers, and Roots and Remixes,
which invites youth to explore the Diaspora of which they are a part and act as
cultural envoys to the world through the development of music videos;
speaking for themselves about what it means to be African American as a
counter-narrative to popular media.
Breai is currently Executive Director of Moving History which teaches the story
of African American people to youth and communities through kinetic
programming including culinary, martial and visual arts, dance, and vocal and
instrumental music. Her work has been supported by grants from the Summer
Funding Collaborative, the Frankie Manning Foundation, and the Baltimore
Children and Youth Fund, which awarded $179,000 in 2018 and again in 2019
to forward the company’s education initiatives.
Moving History’s performance company, Guardian Dance, has taken the stage
at Baltimore’s Reginald F. Lewis Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the
Mechanic Theater and the Hippodrome, as well as having been honored to
perform for the opening of the National Museum of African American History
and Culture at the Smithsonian. Guardian trained students won 1st and 2nd
place in the International Lindy Hop Juniors Division in 2019.
