Alyssa Martens is a Brazilian-Canadian artist-educator dedicated to bridging literary and performing arts with social and environmental sustainability. As an artist-in-residence at Sierra Club BC, she is working to enhance their education programs through the arts.
In recent years, she created writing programs and taught speech and drama at the Bolton Academy of Spoken Arts in Vancouver, taught theatre and directed productions across a number of Montreal stages, and currently leads creative writing and spoken word workshops with youth at DAREarts.
When she isn’t teaching, she enjoys exploring her own writing. In 2019, she was a writer-in-residence at the Gullkistan Centre for Creativity in Iceland, where she developed poetry on environmental degradation. She later performed her poetry at the 2019 Vancouver Outsider Art Festival. Selected as a 2019 BC Culture Days Ambassador, she also shared her work through a community-engaged art installation, A Poetic Landscape. With a BFA from Concordia University and as a current UBC MEd student, focusing on Education for Sustainability, she is curious about the intersections between the arts, education, and environmental sustainability.