Aimé Kelly is the Dance, Outreach, and Youth Visual Arts Coordinator for Multnomah Arts Center. She has developed innovative techniques of theatrical play and created new ways to reach students in all art forms. She has been teaching and professionally inspiring artistic play for almost 20 years, igniting the infinite possibilities inherent in organized creative community arts education, rousing not only joy but sparking a curiosity for language, arts,  movement, and personal expression. With her guidance, faculty members cultivate a process whereby students come to trust their creative impulses to explore, rather than following directions to construct prescribed art “products.”

In 2012, Aimé spearheaded the opening of Little Artists Preschool, a program for high-quality, arts-focused early childhood education. Here, teachers and students explored, tested, built, and rebuilt Aimé’s ideas about bringing the various art forms together into a unified experience at a young age.

Widely recognized in the Portland area for her skills as a community builder, she has worked extensively in the schools and neighborhoods, with business and education leaders, to bring art to the classrooms, streets, homes, basketball courts, schools, and parks of Portland.

Aimé was the arts administrator and an ensemble member of the Shakespeare Liberation Army theatre troupe, taking original adaptations of Shakespeare’s work into Portland Public Schools and the community.

Additionally, Aimé has worked as a professional voice actor both locally and internationally and has performed with both the improvisational theatre group The light-Fingered Five and KBOO’s The Sudden Radio Project.

Aimé has been involved in a vast variety of dance and theatrical stage productions as a performer, director, and designer. In 2006, she co-founded Twilight Repertory Theatre. She was an active member of The Committee for Audio Description in the Arts (CADA), a service for theatre patrons with visual impairments.

Aimé holds Bachelor of Science degrees with honors in Theatre Arts and Arts & Letters.