You Are Amazing Like a Rocket: Pep Talks for Everyone from Young People Around the World

About Asherah WeissJessica Martin

Asherah Weiss is a community artist and interdisciplinary educator based in Northern California. She holds her California teaching credential for art and taught full-time through the early pandemic at a public middle school. Before and since she has worked as a creativity mentor and facilitator with folks from a diverse range of abilities and ages. Her work focuses on discovery and play and continues to expand all the time. Most recently she has been exploring improvisational theater as a student and teacher. Asherah has been the co-creator of many emergent spaces for creativity. She founded and ran womb space collaborative arts a living room for creative community engagement. She also co-created Open Envelope which set up public spaces for people to hand-craft notes of love and send them in the mail including Love Letters to Santa Rosa a response to the first catastrophic fire in Sonoma County. Asherah is currently the Programs Director at Artstart an educational arts non-profit that mentors youth while creating beautiful murals mosaics and more in the community.Jessica Martin is a multi-disciplinary artist educator and curator based in Northern California. Her artwork community public art projects and education programs focus on our relationship to creativity and joy. Jessica studied Anthropology at Vassar College and did her field work in Madagascar and France. She received her MA at California College of the Arts. Jessica has been Artist in Residence for Google and her work has been shown throughout the Bay Area and abroad including at the Headlands Center for the Arts Southern Exposure ProArts Amelie Maison Paris San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art TedX and national film festivals. Her work has been awarded grants from the NEA Creative Sonoma and California Arts Council. In addition to her work as an artist Jessica is the founder of Roving Venue (RV) an itinerant gallery that produces innovative temporary public art projects in rural Sonoma County California. She is also the arts program director and lead teaching artist at West Side Elementary where she and Asherah Weiss launched the Peptoc project.