Troublemaker: Public Works


It’s Simple: Good troublemakers instigate equity, imagination, and community benefit through the arts by building systems to expand access, opportunity, and shared well-being through program design and/or artistic interventions in shared spaces.

Arts Infrastructure is Civil Infrastructure

Troublemaker: Public Works is a community engagement consulting practice that designs and operates hyper-local arts programs for non-profit organizations and develops new work through community-based artistic practices.

Co‑founders Steven Melendez and Christopher Charles McDaniel, have led careers merging classical ballet expertise with community‑driven arts engagement.  Melendez discovered ballet at age seven through New York Theatre Ballet’s LIFT program while living in a Bronx homeless shelter and grew from scholarship student to internationally recognized dancer and artistic leader. After performing across Europe, South America and Asia, he returned to the United States to run the LIFT program and later served as an Artistic Director for National Dance Institute New Mexico and Artistic Director of New York Theatre Ballet.

McDaniel, born in East Harlem, first encountered ballet during a Dance Theatre of Harlem lecture demonstration at his school and successfully auditioned for the company’s youth program at age 10.  His professional career spans Dance Theatre of Harlem, Los Angeles Ballet and Ballet San Antonio.  A sought‑after teacher, he became the first person of color without alumni status to join the School of American Ballet’s permanent faculty and has developed outreach programs for Los Angeles Ballet and Dance Theater of Harlem. Together, Melendez and McDaniel offer lived experience with outreach programs and proven leadership in designing successful arts‑in‑community projects.

What is a Troublemaker?

(Good) Troublemakers instigate equity, imagination, and community benefit through the arts by building systems to expand access, opportunity, and shared well-being through program design and/or artistic interventions in shared spaces.

What is a Public Work?

Public Works are both the visible artistic outcome: performances, films, programs etc. and the underlying infrastructure that makes them possible: relationships with families, new ways of teaching and working, and durable pathways for access and participation.

How does a Troublemaker make a Public Work?

  1. Identify a condition of friction where access is limited, systems are strained, or existing models no longer serve the people inside them.
  2. Build institutional trust and community partnerships, treat constituents as collaborators whose ideas shape the outcome, not as participants to be managed
  3. Document and share results until durable pipelines for talent to meet opportunity emerge.

Things we know:

  • Innovative arts programming requires investment
  • Arts infrastructure is Civil Infrastructure
  • To make arts education into youth development requires collaborative creative processes that give voice to the communities being served.