Alicia Anstead is a journalist, editor, producer, and educator. In addition to heading up programming for artist engagement with students, she is a member of the Office for the Arts (OFA) senior management team, the producer of the annual Arts First Festival, and an instructor in the journalism and writing programs at Harvard Extension School. She is a director, with Marvin Merritt '20, of Downeast Speaks, an annual community storytelling event with ISLE Theater Company in Deer Isle, Maine. She is also a contributing producer, editor, storytelling coach, and strategist for APAP|NYC, the largest annual conference of performing arts professionals. She was previously executive editor of Inside Arts, the magazine for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals in Washington, DC, and of The Writer magazine in Boston. As an arts reporter at the Bangor Daily News in Maine, she won many awards for her writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Scientific American, Harvard Gazette, Chamber Music Magazine, and Art New England. She has been an arts contributor to The Callie Crossley Show and Under the Radar with Callie Crossley on WGBH in Boston and NPR's Morning Edition. An English department graduate of American University (BA) and the University of Maine (MA), Anstead focused her academic work on Black literature, Shakespeare, and women's literature. She has been a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) arts editors program at Duke University. She has produced or co-produced many conferences on the arts and literature.