Screen Time: Leslie Nolte and Maureen Beran

Event Description

Join us for Screen Time, a live virtual talk show airing through Zoom. The monthly program, hosted by Englert’s events director, Jessica Egli, invites teachers, artists, educational and artistic administrators, students, parents, and any other curious community member to come together to discuss the current challenges around reimagining our work for the virtual world and the execution of that work.

Each episode will feature two or three local professionals who will share their stories of hardship and triumph. The program will seek to build bridges between individuals and institutions that can benefit from developing new relationships or strengthening existing ones in an effort to deepen the impact of Iowa City’s online arts education opportunities for all.

Leslie Nolte has emerged as an innovator in arts education in the Iowa City creative community for two decades. Under her direction, Nolte Academy has become a premiere arts program with 30 specialized instructors, 1,100 students, a summer dance intensive and an on-site arts-immersive performing arts day school. As part of Kennedy Center’s Ensuring the Arts for Any Given Child program, Leslie has brought workshop dance instruction to area schools, helping to guarantee access and equity to the arts for all students. Leslie has also been a guest lecturer at The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business and was the 2019 recipient of the Larry Eckholt Award recognizing her commitment to the Corridor’s arts and culture community. Her future plans for arts education include establishing the first performing arts high school in Iowa, the Iowa Conservatory (ICon), here in our community. Leslie is a mom of five who also finds time to act in local theatre, teach Pilates at her studio, support various local and national arts endeavors and deepen her personal yoga practice.

Maureen Beran is the owner of barre3 Iowa City. Barre3 is a full-body balanced workout that combines strength conditioning, cardio, and mindfulness. Maureen learned about barre3 from the podcast, “How I Built This,” with Guy Raz. At the time, she worked out because she felt she had to or she should. Maureen had creaky joints and felt like she was constantly recovering from some injury after pushing myself too far. After hearing the founder, Sadie, speak about barre3’s values and philosophy, she was intrigued but skeptical it could be fun or restorative. She started with barre3 online videos, alone, in her basement. The focus on alignment helped with the creaky joints, the positive messages from instructors helped with the feelings of dread about working out, and the empowerment she got from being in charge helped to better know and appreciate her body.

About the Host:
Jessica Egli is a musician, actor, adjunct instructor at the University of Iowa, and Events Director for the Englert. Her work at the Englert has primarily involved handling logistics of show and festival production, but more recently she has had the privilege to come on as a programmer for the theater’s arts education program, Wavelength. Her first project was designing and producing the summer youth acting camp, Acting Out!. In late Spring of 2020, she and her team created the video series, Acting Out Prep School, as an answer to programming for youth at the start of the pandemic. She’s overjoyed to debut Screen Time as a platform for artists and educators in our community to share their own stories of transforming their work for the digital world.