Baker Artist Portfolios

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 culture. She presented the findings of this work, in conjunction with the outcomes of her Master’s inquiry, at Spellman College, and developed a curriculum based on her conclusions for the Leadership Center at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.  Using her burgeoning methodology for the restoration of cultural health, Breai developed an educational program called Youth Truth for Boston’s American Friends Service Committee which was a precursor to her work here in Baltimore in its focus on youth as the locus of social change.

Since 2002, Breai has worked in Baltimore City Schools, introducing students to African American history through dance. Over the course of that time, Breai has written numerous Arts-Integration curricula including The Beloved Community, which facilitated youth leadership of a community forum discussing the cycles of drug and gun violence, The Corner and The Colony, which used an installation of photo essays to draw correlations between the European colonization of North America and the occupation of street corners by drug dealers, and Roots and Remixes, which invited youth to explore the Diaspora of which they are a part and act as cultural envoys to the world, through video; speaking for themselves about what it means to be African American, as a counter-narrative to popular media.  Her work has been supported by grants from Teaching Tolerance and the Frankie Manning Foundation, which named her a Cultural Ambassador in 2014, and the Baltimore Children and Youth Fund, which awarded Guardian Dance Company’s Moving History Project, of which she is the Director, $179,000 in 2018 to forward the company’s education initiatives.

From 1998-2003, Breai danced with three professional African Dance companies between Boston and Baltimore until the founding of her own company, Guardian, in 2003. Guardian practices, performs and passes on African American history and culture through dance. In the confirmation of its’ vision, Guardian trained students who won 1st and 2nd place in the International Lindy Hop Juniors Division in 2019. Over it’s 17 year history, Guardian has toured Baltimore City Schools, performing for students and communities, held block parties and teaching workshops with the partnership of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts’ Artscape Festival, and was awarded a home at the Lyric Opera House at its artists in residence as a part of its Origins Project in 2019. As stewards of the embodiment of the African American vernacular tradition, Guardian has performed at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Mechanic Theater and the Hippodrome, as well as for the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian. Breai has acted as moderator for a forum on hip hop and international conflict resolution at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C, and is a board member of Collective Voices for Change, an international work group focused on racial equity in the Jazz dance community.  She is the proud mother of three.