Joey Cienian serves as the Director of Educational Programming and Student Support at the High School for Recording Arts in Saint Paul, MN. High School for Recording Arts is dedicated to engaging dropped out, overaged, and under-credited students using a highly personalized, creative, and constructivist learning program. HSRA believes in Hip Hop Pedagogy and an Arts Engagement focus to provide a creative and therapeutic environment to re-engage students. The focus of Joey’s work has been in building out HSRA’s advisory structure, a site-wide commitment to social justice programming, innovative pedagogy in the classroom, competency based assessment models, and dynamic project based learning. He is passionate about researching and implementing creative re-engagement techniques that help young people build positive relationships, resiliency skills, start to work through the effects of trauma, and learn topics they find provocative in ways that match their needs.

Joey has worked the last eight years in education in the Twin Cities as a Paraprofessional, Teacher, and Administrator. The foundation of his work in social justice advocacy came in his years as a Community Organizer working with Greenpeace in Arizona and Minnesota.

Joey holds an Honors BA in History and Political Philosophy from University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a licensed Social Studies Teacher and is currently completing his Masters in Teaching at Hamline University. He was born in Wisconsin and has lived in Minnesota since 2009. He enjoys making art and music, spending time with his family, camping and hiking in Minnesota’s amazing parks, and playing basketball.