In this episode, Alicia interviews curator & founder of Alpha Arts Alliance Sadaf Padder. After nearly a decade as a public schooler educator and a lifetime of watching art from the sidelines, Sadaf left her job as a Dean of Students in 2019 and founded Alpha Arts Alliance, an arts agency focused on historically-underrepresented artists with a focus on women of color. Through curation, coaching, events and youth programming, she serves to make art accessible to the people she loves as a passion and a practice. 

Of her many professional accomplishments, she takes pride in having earned over $150K in grants and residencies for local artists and collectives. Sadaf is also a Create Change Fellow alumna with the Laundromat Project, a board member with ArtBridge and Chickweed Alliance and a member of Phoenix Community Garden.

A South-Asian American woman of Kashmiri heritage, in her own art practice she is an abstract painter, jeweler and henna artist. She is a graduate of George Washington University (BA in Anthropology) and Johns Hopkins University (Masters of Art in Teaching) and is a Teach for America Baltimore alum. 

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