Share:

Facebook Twitter Share

About Breai

Baltimore City

Breai Michele is a Baltimore native, community activist, teacher, dancer, and cultural counselor.  A Harvard graduate, Breai’s Master’s Thesis explored the role of Hip-Hop as a religious and moral touchstone for African American youth.  In 2001, she was selected as a contributor to the Boston Healing Landscapes project with Boston University School of Medicine where she conducted research into the connection between mental health in young women and exposure to the norms espoused by popular… more

View Breai's Resume
Jump to a project:

Dance for Social Change in Baltimore

Through dance performance, practice and instruction, Breai Mason-Campbell's work harnesses positive elements of culture at work in Baltimore's neighborhoods to strategically interrupt the cycles of violence which threaten the youth in our city and beyond. Her Community Art Methodology is aimed at providing participants and audiences with an opportunity to focus on positive elements of African American history and culture in order to build self-esteem, cooperative values, and collaboration skills.  In the 2015-16 season, this work focused on the famed Apollo theater, and the role that the Arts has played in the advancement of African American ideals.  This video is a compilation of student performances which were the outcome of this effort. 
  • Apollo History
    Community members in the Sandtown/Winchester neighborhood were invited to consider the role of dance and the Arts in social change in this exploration of the Apollo Theater's place in the history of Harlem and the Great Migration.
    •

    Self Knowledge=Self-Love

    Working with youth is a part of Breai Mason-Campbell's commitment to equal rights to education. She believes that access to positive self-images and self-concepts to people as their identities are still forming is a road to decreased violence, and healthier communities.  In the 2011-12 season, understanding the "African" element of what it means to be "African American" was a focal point of Mason-Campbell's work.

    Through anecdotal inquiry and community conversations, opinions of Africa were found to be related primarily to poverty, sickness and ignorance. Mason-Campbell set out to investigate the beauty of Africa through movement with her students in Sandtown in order to rectify these assumptions and repair distorted identities. The music video attached is a tribute to the intersection of the past and the future present in the lives of black Americans. 


    • Teach Me How To Kuku (Official Video 2011) by New Song Academy 1st Grade
      This music video is a remix of a popular song "Teach Me How to Dougie" revised to explore the connections between Africa and African Americans. Parents, community members and children in Sandtown were exposed to elements of African culture and invited to celebrate the presence of that rich history in their lives.
    •