Heather Davis joined the LearningWorks team in September 2016. Prior to LearningWorks, she was the executive director of The Telling Room, a community writing center in Portland, for five years. Heather earned a BA from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM, where she studied philosophy, literature, and the history of math and science. She earned an MA from Goddard College, where she designed an individualized program that combined coursework on youth development, arts education, and creative writing with a practicum as a writing teacher at TRUCE, the Harlem Children’s Zone’s after school arts and education program. Heather relocated to Portland, Maine in 2008 from Austin, TX, where she co-founded a youth writing center called Austin Bat Cave and served as the senior grant writer for Creative Action, a nonprofit arts education organization.
She is a member of the Institute for Civic Leadership’s Upsilon class, where alongside peers from the nonprofit, public, and private sectors, she studied a facilitative leadership model designed to foster deep collaboration in the workplace. Her professional accomplishments have been recognized by a St. John’s College Award of Merit, which is given to outstanding alumni in recognition of their achievements within their chosen field; the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, which presented a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program award to Young Writers & Leaders, a literary arts program for refugee and immigrant youth that she designed and launched at The Telling Room; and the 2018 Metamorphosis Visionary Leader Award.