Jo-Ann Castano is a sculptor, arts educator and a community arts activist and organizer. She received her BA at Goddard College and also lived and worked in Pietrasanta, Italy at the marble studio of Sem Ghelardini and the Marianni Foundaria. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Her more recent work has been in polarized kinetic light sculpture which was exhibited at the Science Museum in NYC and in gallery representation in Carmel, California. She is a founder, past president and acting director of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (seARTS) which received MCC funding under the John and Abigail Adams fund for economic development and the creative economy in Gloucester, MA. Also helped establish the City of Gloucester Committee for the Arts. She founded and ran an art center in Salem’s Old Town Hall from 1977-1983 and founded arts organizations in Gloucester, Salem, Newburyport and Brockton MA. She also initiated the MCC-LCC, Salem Cultural Council during that period. She has lectured on the arts and marble carving at Yale in conjunction with the teachers symposium for the Exhibition I, Claudia : Women in Ancient Rome and on teaching technology at MIT, We Wired the Classroom:Now What?. Jo-Ann is also a web designer with a focus on artists and arts related web sites. She taught polarized light sculpture and web programming and design for eleven years at the Women in Technology (WIT) summer program of the Vermont Technical College. She is the principal of Castano Design Associates/ArtsGloucester and continues to promote and consult on community arts on the North Shore, in Massachusetts. She was an enthusiastic advisor to ArtThrob, North Shore's online arts and cultural Magazine in its infancy. You can find her Twittering for ArtsGloucester and posting on cultural social networks.
Ms. Castano, acting as president and executive director, developed and managed a state funded artist residency and professional development program (Community Development Through the Arts) raising over 1M dollars, employing and training over eighty artists. She has experience in grantsmanship, board development with fiduciary and governance leadership.
