Micaela Blei

MICAELA BLEI, PhD, has been teaching, studying and performing true, personal storytelling nationwide since 2012, and teaching and facilitating arts education for 20 years. A two-time Moth GrandSLAM winner, former Director of Education at The Moth, and former third grade teacher, Micaela has performed worldwide and taught storytelling and hosted shows at K-12 schools and at Columbia University, Brown University, Skidmore College, Penn State University, Northeastern, and many others. She has given keynotes and research talks on storytelling, identity and empathy at conferences and universities nationwide.

Micaela is the co-founder of The Moth’s Education Program, growing the program from a single high school after school pilot in 2012 to a national resource reaching hundreds of NYC high school students, college students across the country and providing training and curriculum design for over 1,500 educators worldwide.

Micaela’s dissertation research focused on the role that storytelling plays in the identity formation of K-12 educators. Her research interests include the role of narrative in organizational development strategy, the relationship between the personal and the professional in educator identity, and the politics of personal narrative performance. She is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education. She has held fellowships with the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale; UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers; and Skidmore’s MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute.

Micaela’s stories can be heard onThe Moth Radio Hour and podcast, Family Ghosts, Risk! and many other shows. She is the creator of three solo storytelling shows: City of Islands, a dystopian fantasy for middle grades; The Secret Life of Your Third Grade Teacher; and the forthcoming science fiction comedy, Causality: The Single Ladies' Guide to Time Travel on a Budget.

Find out more at micaelablei.com.