Brooke has 20+ years of experience working in nonprofits and education in many roles, including executive director, curriculum coach, facilitator, and classroom teacher. 

In 2017 Brooke co-founded Agency by Design Oakland (AbDO) a local initiative in Oakland, California that creates ecosystems of educators working to shift school culture using hands-on, liberatory practices. AbDO grew out of a research project between Oakland teachers and Project Zero, a research institute based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where Brooke participated as a teacher-researcher and coach. In just five years, as AbDO’s executive director and later co-director, Brooke grew the organization’s budget from $30,000/year to $500,000/year, leveraging district and community partnerships and strategically and sustainably increasing the project’s impact across the city.  

For almost a decade, from 2012 to 2021, Brooke worked at Oakland International High School (OIHS), first as an art/technology teacher and media academy director, and then as an instructional and curriculum coach. There she leveraged the arts and technology to teach English to newcomer students who spoke 30+ languages; unaccompanied and undocumented immigrant minors from Central America made up 60% of the student body. She supported individuals and teams of teachers to shift their classrooms to be inquiry-based, anti-racist, and hands-on.

Brooke has extensive experience designing and facilitating workshops for adult learners, particularly educators. In addition to leading Agency by Design Oakland’s yearlong teacher fellowship, and facilitating learning communities at OIHS, she was also faculty in Alameda County Office of Education’s (ACOE) Integrated Learning Specialist Program and a coach in Harvard’s online professional programs. Through ACOE she co-facilitated college-level courses for educators learning creative approaches to addressing inequities in schools. There she combined multiple approaches, including liberatory pedagogies from bell hooks and Paulo Freire, as well as Project Zero frameworks like Teaching for Understanding and Studio Habits of Mind. And as a coach with Harvard’s Graduate School of Education she guided teams of educators from around the globe in Harvard’s four-month online course: “Teaching and Learning in the Maker-Centered Learning Classroom.” 

Before moving to the East Bay, Brooke worked with Youth in Arts, Marin Country’s largest arts education non-profit. There she designed and led a full-service arts after-school program for hundreds of K-8 students in a Title 1 district, developed a K-5 fully integrated arts and social studies curriculum, and collaborated on an arts assessment research project funded by the Marin Community Foundation. 

Brooke got her start as a teaching artist working with Urban Arts Partnership in New York City, working in multiple boroughs to integrate digital photography into core classroom content. Before that, she spent two years living and working in Latin America. As an artist-in-residence with ArtCorps (now Creative Action Institute), she lived in the highlands of Guatemala and worked closely with an environmental youth group connected to the World Conservation Union. She also lived in Mérida, Venezuela, where she learned Spanish and taught art in a sex-ed program for middle schoolers. 

Brooke recently moved back to central Connecticut, where she grew up. She lives with her husband and two kids, Max and Zadie. Brooke’s art practice combines art-based research and public practice exploring settler colonialism and our relationship to the land. She is currently an artist-in-residence and board member of root2RISE, a local group advocating culturally relevant outdoor education. Brooke holds a BA in Studio Art and American Studies from Williams College, a teaching credential from San Francisco State University, and is currently pursuing her Masters of Fine Arts at Lesley University.