About
Citizen Arts and Education fosters artistic growth and cultural dialogue by supporting innovative, multidisciplinary performance and connecting artists across generations. Through mentorship, resources, and collaborative opportunities, we enable experienced and emerging performing artists to take creative risks, experiment across forms, and build artistic communities.
Meg Araneo
Artistic Director and Co-Founder
Meg Araneo is a Brooklyn-based theatre-maker, producer, and scholar advancing interdisciplinary performance at the intersection of embodied difference, medicine, and civic life. As a practitioner, Meg has collaborated with artists working in various forms, including jazz musician, poet, and visual artist Oliver Lake and composer Rob Reddy on the multi-disciplinary performance piece INTERRUPTION! presented at BRIC Arts Media in Brooklyn. In spring 2024, she was awarded an artist residency at the Catwalk Institute in Catskill, NY. Her original play, Salomania, was presented at the Thomas Cole Historical Center in 2025. That same year Meg produced the first U.S. iteration of Théâtre de la Ville’s Poetic Consultations project. In 2026, she became Co-Director of the new Citizen Arts International Festival as well as its Managing Director. Meg’s scholarly work has been published in Modern Drama, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Slavic and East European Performance, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. She is on faculty in the Drama Department at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and the MFA Theatre Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
Rob Reddy
Co-Founder
Rob Reddy formed his first ensemble in 1989 featuring legendary bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Pheeroan akLaff. Since then, he has worked almost exclusively as a band leader, with the exception of brief stints with Workman’s ensemble and Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society. He founded the Reddy Music label in 2006 and released A Hundred Jumping Devils, which earned him a Chamber Music America commission. His second release, Book of the Storm, which featured an all-star 19-piece ensemble, was commissioned by the Jerome Foundation and New York State Council of the Arts. It premiered at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. Rob has been awarded commissions and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Composers Forum, Meet the Composer, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the American Music Center, and the MAP Fund. He has received several residencies including at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center and BRIC Arts Media. Rob holds a BFA in Jazz from The New School and an MM in Music Composition from NYU.
Mia Cusianovic
Associate Director of The Nest
Mia Cusianovic is a first-generation Chilean–Croatian–Peruvian actor, writer, theatermaker, producer, and musician whose work centers storytelling as a communal and transformative practice. Her creative inquiry is shaped by ancestry, inheritance, embodiment, and the experiences of women, exploring how personal and collective histories live in the body and on stage. Through her own production company, Matchbox Productions, she develops and co-produces new performance and literary work, and her practice extends to dramaturgy and curation across live arts spaces. She is the Associate Director of The Nest, Citizen Arts’ emerging artists program, where she collaborates closely with the founder to support early-career artists and foster spaces for experimentation and creative rigor. Mia holds a BFA in Acting with honors from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, with a concentration in Art & Public Policy, and is based between New York City and Los Angeles.