ALIVE Center for Community Partnerships Staff - Nadia De Leon

Ms. Nadia De Leon

Community Engagement Coordinator

Office:  ALIVE Center for Community Partnerships
Phone:  270-782-0082
Email:  nadia.deleon@wku.edu
Website:  http://www.wku.edu/alive

Bio

Nadia De Leon is the Community Engagement Coordinator. She works with campus and community partnerships, as well as service learning and community-based scholarship opportunities for our students and faculty - such as The $100 Solution™ and Hill House. Nadia is originally from Argentina and grew up in Panama. She is a doctoral student in educational leadership. She recently completed a Master's in Folklore at WKU, with a Public Sector track, focusing on education, cultural conservation, and work with museums and community organizations. She also completed a graduate certificate in Women's Studies. Her research focuses on dance ethnology, identity, and post-colonialism. She is also a graduate of the WKU Honors College and holds a B.A. Interdisciplinary Arts Education with emphasis in Dance Education, for which she completed a thesis on Belly Dance as a means of Dance Therapy for Survivors of Sexual Assault, and implemented a Hispanic Arts & Humanities Educational Program titled Raices - Identity in Movement.

Nadia has been dancing since childhood and trained as a professional dancer in a number of styles. She works with dance therapy and ethnic dances (mainly Middle Eastern and Latin dances). She also teaches yoga and is a certified group fitness instructor. She has initiated Impromptu Dance Company and Kali Collective for the application of dance and other movement disciplines to social activism, and is director and co-owner of InMotion Dance & Yoga Studio and Multicultural Center.

In the Spring 2009, Nadia was artist in residence at Cumberland Trace Elementary, where  she taught a unit on Hispanic arts and culture, through music, dance, and visual arts. She was also a 2009 Latino Museum Studies Program Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, where she was able to discuss issues of representation and interpretation of Latino culture, and work with the team that produced the educational materials for the Panama Passages exhibition. She is currently writing for Encyclopedia of Latino Folklore to be published by Greenwood Press, and consulting with the Panamanian newspaper La Prensa for a series on Panamanian Folklore. She also writes on socio-cultural, gender, identity, and political issues in Latin music and dance.

She is an experienced administrator and program manager with knowledge of non-profit organizations, arts and cultural administration, as well as international, bilingual, and multicultural education. She is also interested in social justice and equality, sustainability, and arts activism. She has been the recipient of multiple grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and was honored to receive a 2010 WKU International Reach Award and the 2011 Women of Achievement Award in the arts category. She has volunteered with multiple community organizations in Bowling Green, including Hope Harbor and the Hispanic Organization for the Promotion of Education. She is also a part-time faculty member in the Folklore and Anthropology department, where she teaches cultural diversity classes. She hopes to continue being involved and having leadership roles in the overlapping areas of higher education, arts and culture, and community work, locally and internationally.