Underground Railroad in Western New York Advisory Committee Biographies

Lillion Batchelor

Lillion Batchelor was born in Buffalo.  Part of her childhood was spent in Ohio, near the Mason-Dixon line, where she gained an interest in and awareness of black history and the issues facing African-Americans at the time.  Returning to Buffalo as a teenager, she was shocked at how little was being taught in school about black history.  Batchelor was active in Buffalo during the civil rights movement, forming groups and marching and educating.  She was motivated both by her internal beliefs and the experience of discrimination in North Carolina and Maryland while visiting family.

Though Batchelor attended college classes, she never graduated; she held a variety of administrative jobs throughout her working life.  She continued to educate herself and work passionately to learn and teach about the history of a neglected segment of our history. Her Underground Railroad historical focus honed in on Broderick Park in Buffalo’s Black Rock neighborhood, directly across from Fort Erie, where the escaping slaves could cross to freedom.  She is inspired by the breadth of Canadian knowledge and educational efforts on the topic.  “Until this history is put into writing and taught in American schools, we will never know the complete history of our country,” she said.

Rhonda C. Bivins

Rhonda C. Bivins, the Youth Engagement Coordinator for Read to Succeed Buffalo, became involved with the Underground Railroad residency as a result of her desire to become more educated about black history and migration.  Her goal is to pass on what she learns to families through the programs she helps coordinate and develop, programs that increase literacy skills among youth and young adults.

Bivins has worked with youth in both Erie and Niagara Counties. She holds a Bachelors degree in Social Work from Buffalo State College, and is pursuing her Master’s degree in Education there as well.  She is a Board Member for the Mental Health Association of Niagara and Boys and Girls Club of Niagara.  Bivins is an advocate and sensitivity trainer for Rape Crisis Services, and a community health advocate for Independent Health.  She is also a GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) presenter and serves as a program development consultant.

W. Charles Brandy

W. Charles Brandy is the Director of the Social Studies Education Department of the Buffalo Public Schools.  He became involved in the Underground Railroad program through his commitment to providing equitable analysis and representation of local history.  Brandy feels that the Underground Railroad is vital part of American, New York State and Western New York history.  He supports using local history to help students think, act, and write like historians.

Brandy started his career as a teacher at Hamlin Park School #74, where he organized a mentoring program for at-risk students, and as a teacher at Futures Academy School #37. He was a supervisor in the Office of Pupil Personnel Services, and an assistant principal at Lincoln Academy School #44.

A native of Liberia, West Africa, Brandy came to the United States at the age of seven. He grew up in New York City, transferring to Buffalo State College from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He earned a dual undergraduate degree in History and Social Studies Education, as well as a School District Administrator certificate from Canisius College. He is pursuing a doctorate in educational leadership at Walden University.

Brandy is the recipient of the Omega Man of the Year Award and WBLK’s community service award for 2003.

Nicole Carroll

Nicole R. Carroll is a teacher, poet and musician. She is excited to be part of the Underground Railroad project for many reasons, including the effort to go beyond textbooks’ ability to explore issues surrounding the topic; specifically its connections to everyone across race, age, class, and even historical era. 

Carroll is enthusiastic that students will learn about power; who has it and why, who gives and takes it, and how.  Traits that come into play, she feels, include dignity, courage, intelligence, and creativity.  The project’s teaching artists are examples of these traits; they amaze Carroll with their innovation, commitment and resources.  Their ability to effectively translate these issues into artistic language is what will make the project comes alive for all audiences.

She has been a member of the Young Audiences of Western New York board of directors since 2009.  Carroll holds a NYS Initial Certification in English 7-12 Education, which she earned at SUNY College at Buffalo.  She also holds a BA in English from Ithaca College.

She is a case manager for the Transitional Housing program and teacher for the Teen Education and Leadership department for the YWCA of Western New York. She previously worked at The Franciscan Center, and taught at Lancaster High School. She volunteered at the Creative Edge Arts Studio’s Arts Therapy Program, and is deeply involved in bringing creativity through the arts and writing to as many people as she can.

Annette Daniels-Taylor

Annette Daniels-Taylor is a playwright, poet, actor, teacher, singer and costumer. In 2009, Daniels-Taylor won the Artie’s Emanuel Fried Award for New Play, A Little Bit of Paradise, which premiered at Road Less Traveled Productions in 2008.

In preparing for Young Audiences’ Underground Railroad residency, Daniels-Taylor concluded that children might connect more to a character who was an actual person. Avoiding the obvious, like Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth, she sought a woman who had lived on the Erie Canal. Her search revealed Nancy Freeman, upon whom she is basing her character.

She is excited to work with and perform for young people, hoping to inspire them to write and perform themselves, as well as to help them see how relevant their history is to their present life; how different life was 100 years ago; and how important Buffalo was to this movement and its place in history.

Daniels-Taylor has worked at many notable Buffalo venues, including the Albright Knox Art Gallery, and the Buffalo Ensemble Theatre. While living in New York, she wrote and acted, and received a scholarship from the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. She and her husband, artist Rodney Taylor, moved to his native Buffalo so that they could devote more time to their art and their four children.

Daniels-Taylor is a co-founder of Down in My Soul Productions, a member of ASCAP and The Dramatists Guild, and writer-in-residence at The Langston Hughes Institute. She is also a teaching artist for the Arts in Education Institute of Western New York, Irish Classical Theatre Company, and the African American Cultural Center.

Marianne Dixon

Marianne Dixon, a Buffalo native and graduate of South Park High School, became involved in the Underground Railroad project through her relationship with the Buffalo Teachers Center and her work with the Teaching American History Grant.

She is committed to historical accuracy, and wants to be a part of the project to ensure that the lessons are grade- and student-appropriate. Dixon remembers her elementary school field trip to the Michigan Street Baptist Church to see the basement alcove where escaping slaves were hidden.

Dixon is a Project Administrator II for the Teaching American History Grant for the Buffalo Public Schools, Department of Social Studies. She holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Social Studies Education from Buffalo State College. She is certified to teach grades 7-12 social studies, and in addition, earned a Masters in School Administration from Canisius College.

Cynnie Gaasch

Cynnie Gaasch has been the Executive Director of Young Audiences WNY since August of 2009. She began working with the organization in 2003, serving in various capacities, including teaching artist and director of development.  Gaasch is a working visual artist, exhibiting her abstract paintings throughout the northeast.

The Underground Railroad in WNY project is the first major program creation initiated under Gaasch's direction of Young Audiences WNY.  Formed through a collaborative process, incorporating community knowledge and history with a multi-talented advisory committee allows students access to the knowledge, talent, and history passed down through generations. 

It is also a new direction for Young Audiences to address serious human inequities, and to try to provide students with tools to understand a major social issue such as racism through our programs.  She finds the opportunity to increase community understanding and address racial disparities face on through experiential learning in the arts exhilarating.  She looks forward to building more programs driving toward social change based on this model. 

Gaasch is thrilled with the opportunity to work with Ujima Theater Company to identify new African-American artists for Young Audiences' roster and to refine artist's skills in presenting for children.

As a grant-writing consultant, Gaasch’s clients included American Institute of Architects Buffalo/WNY Chapter, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Buffalo ReUse, Somali Bantu Organization, and Buffalo First.  She holds an MFA from American University and a BA from Hampshire College.  She has been the gallery curator for the Olean Public Library and art critic for ARTVOICE.  She was also a professor of art and curator at SUNY Fredonia, and executive and artistic director of the Chautauqua Center for the Visual Arts. 

Ntare Ali Gault/Njozi Chorus

Ntare Ali Gault, founder and organizer of the Njozi Poets/Chorus, is a spoken-word artist, poet, actor, playwright, and author. His book, “The Sun Will Rise: A Memoir of an Urban Family” was published in 2008. He works on the stage with Ujima Theatre Company. Gault has won poetry slams throughout North America.

Gault’s workshops for the Underground Railroad residency are based on material researched throughout his lifetime, and particularly for his play “Ancestral Links: Love and other Revolutionary Mumblings.”  He based his poems and spoken word pieces for the play on stories passed down to him through his grandmothers.

“Ancestral Links” tracks the journey of Africans, ultimately giving voice to those enslaved during this painful time in American history.  The show presents songs by Emma J. Tindley-Horner and her niece, Lauretta M. Anderson.  Tindley-Horner was the wife of a Buffalo preacher, and the daughter of famed hymnal writer Dr. Charles Albert Tindley, the “grandfather of gospel music.”  Tindely wrote By and By, When the Morning Comes, Leave It There, Stand By Me and the original civil rights anthem, We Shall Overcome.  “Ancestral Links” combines these songs with dance, drumming and Gault’s family-based poetry.

Gault has conducted workshops for Young Audiences of WNY, the Alternative Literacy Program, Musicians United for Superior Education and Just Buffalo Literacy Center, specifically inspiring several students to become professional performers.

Rahwa Ghirmatzion

Rahwa Ghirmatzion is the Executive Director of Ujima Company, Inc.; she has been with the company in a variety of positions since 2004. Ujima was founded in 1980, and is a not-for-profit theatrical company and community organization that works collaboratively and responsibly in Buffalo.

Ghirmatzion feels that Ujima and Young Audiences’ collaboration is a natural fit, and hopes that the Underground Railroad residency will bring attention to Buffalo’s historic past. Many people are not aware of Buffalo’s unique connection to the Underground Railroad. Using the arts to convey the information is another unique aspect of the collaboration, and, she says, much more effective than being lectured to or just reading about it. When kids—many of whom are visual learners—participate, the information stays with them much longer.

Ghirmatzion attended Hutchinson Technical High School and University at Buffalo, and has worked in many capacities in the non-profit and arts worlds. As Executive Director and Producer for Ujima, she liaises with the community and Board of Directors; develops and administers the budget; addresses the organization’s political realities; conducts development programs; supervises administrative and artistic staff; and runs seasonal publicity campaigns, the production schedule, technical assistance, sets, costumes, house management, and box office sales.

She has been a panelist and participated in development courses. She is a member of the Partnership for the Public Good (PPG) Steering Committee, a local think- and do-tank helping its partner organizations with research, advocacy, and communication.

Lorna C. Hill

Lorna C. Hill is a director, actor, teacher, storyteller, poet, playwright and the founder and Artistic Director of Ujima Company, Inc., a multi-cultural membership organization dedicated to providing a vehicle for African American performers, theatre crafts people and administrators.

Hill feels that the Underground Railroad residency offered an opportunity to mentor young performers and artists as they become teaching artists, passing on the understanding and perspective that she has gained as a teaching artist herself.

In addition, she holds a commitment to resistance; as an African-American woman, she relishes the chance to be involved in teaching the history of the Underground Railroad, as just a piece of the larger tapestry in the history of resistance. She also is firm in her conviction that the opportunity for student/participants in the residency to get a greater understanding of that history through the arts is important. The arts shed light on everything they comes in contact with; that is their purpose, she says.

As an actress, Hill’s experience includes stage, film, television, commercials and voice-overs. Her best known play, "Yalla Bitch" was performed at the first International Women Playwrights Conference in 1986. She is holds a Masters in Theatre, and is a perpetual PhD candidate at the University at Buffalo’s Department of American Studies. She was the first woman accepted at Dartmouth College, and holds a BA in history.
 
She has consulted or performed in many communities, and at many institutions and agencies throughout Western New York, including the Buffalo and Rochester school systems, Western New York Institute for the Arts, SUNY at Buffalo, Just Buffalo Literary Center, King Urban life Center, and Youth Leadership Buffalo.

Bishop William Henderson

Bishop William Henderson is the caretaker of the Historical Michigan Street Baptist Church, which was a stop on the Underground Railroad. He was invited to advise the Underground Railroad residency project because of his scholarship and expertise on the subject. Bishop Henderson has been involved with the Church since the mid-70s.

He feels it’s vital that all children, and particularly African-American children, are taught the history of the Underground Railroad in their school curriculum. “Knowing where they came from can give them something to lift up their morale,” he says. “They learn that if these poor runaway slaves can make it to freedom, they can make it also.”

Bishop Henderson is a native of Buffalo’s East Side, and a graduate of Hutchison Central High. He received a B.S. in Nursing from the University at Buffalo, and holds a diploma in Theology from the now-defunct Randolph Coleman Bible Academy.

Sunnylee Mowery

Sunnylee Mowery is Arts and Education Director for Young Audiences of Western New York. Her hopes for the Underground Railroad in WNY Residency include helping students relate to and take ownership of an important piece of rarely discussed history.  Mowery believes that song, theatre, dance, and creative writing are extraordinary tools for exploring the Underground Railroad movement’s themes of resistance and resilience.

Mowery’s position at Young Audiences supports this belief as well: using art to instill in students a sense of pride and a drive toward creativity.  She is also a working artist.  She is a certified teacher in both New York and Pennsylvania and has taught in both states.

Mowery attended the Pennsylvania Governor’s School in 2000, and was educated at Penn State and Temple University, where she studied painting. She was the 2007 recipient of the Essie Baron Memorial Award for Unusual Promise in the field of Art Education.  She was also an assistant curator to several prominent artists in the Philadelphia area. Her current work explores the constellation of folk artistry, digital mediation, Pennsylvanian mythos and avant-garde fabric design.

Carol L. Murphy

Carol L. Murphy has been the owner and manager of Murphy Orchards since 1980. She is also the executive director of The McClew Interpretive Center, Inc., a not-for-profit organization founded to research, preserve and share the history and social contributions of the McClew family, which established the farm in 1807. They lived there for four generations. Charles McClew inherited the farm in 1850, and, with his wife Anna Maria, was involved in the Underground Railroad Network from then until 1861.

Murphy Orchards is now a commercial fruit farm, and a historical community landmark.  Based upon the value of Murphy Orchards’ educational programs, in 2001 it was named one of the original 35 sites admitted in the National Park Service Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.  It was also selected as a Local Interpretive Center for the New York State Underground Railroad Heritage Trail in 2005.

Murphy’s community involvement also extends to a term on the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Commission. She has served on the boards of directors for the Eastern Niagara Chamber of Commerce, Niagara USA, and the Niagara Tourism and Convention Corporation.

Sara Rodland

Sara Rodland is the Co-Director of the Buffalo Teacher Resource Center (BTRC), and an elementary classroom teacher in the Buffalo Public School system.  Because of her interest in Social Studies, she was thrilled to hear that Young Audiences was developing an Underground Railroad program.  Rodland was eager to help, particularly in developing a program that students and teachers would experience in their classrooms.  She feels that the Western New York connection makes it even more compelling.

Rodland holds an MS in Education from Canisius College and a BS in Education from D’Youville College.  She is certified to teach Nursery, Kindergarten and Grades 1-6, and Gifted Education.

Rodland has been employed by the Buffalo Public Schools since 1971, teaching in various schools throughout the system.  She has participated in many professional development programs.  She presents frequently for the BTRC, and is active in leadership, serving on the New York State Education Department Regents Standards Review Initiative for ELA Standards, and as the Secretary for the Buffalo Teachers Federation, among many other activities.