MITM Trainer: Kelly Armor

Location: Erie, PA
Availability: Widely Available
Travel Area: 500 Miles
Trainer Bio: Kelly Armor is an educator, folklorist, singer, multi-instrumentalist, and storyteller. For the past 25 years she has worked intensively with Erie’s New American community, identifying artists and supporting their work to preserve their culture and traditions in their new home and creating systems for the greater community to honor, celebrate, and benefit from the New American’s indigenous knowledge. From 2003-18 she was the Folk Art & Education Director at the Erie Art Museum where she initiated a job development and cultural preservation program that prepared Latina and former refugees to work in early childhood settings and to use their traditional songs on the job. A major initiative of this project sent New American song coaches into hundreds of early childhood classrooms across the county, teaching their songs and culture to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers. Before her tenure at the Museum she spent a decade as a professional performer, interpreting the folk music from East Africa, Appalachia, and the British Isles. She has a B.A. in Ethnomusicology from Friends World Program of Long Island University, where she did field work from 1986-89 in Kenya and Tanzania in traditional music, Swahili language, and English language instruction.