Photo by Dessa Kirk

About

Meghan Holtan is an artist, data analyst, juggler, and mother. She performed and taught circus arts around the United States before returning home to Anchorage, Alaska in 2012 to work as an analyst at a community health and planning firm based in Anchorage. She is currently a PhD student in Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo. She studies the relationship between the built environment and health equity, with a focus on the social context of these relationships, housing, and green space. She hopes to return to Alaska to teach, research, and contribute to the sustainability of urban communities in the circumpolar North.

Meghan loves making art in public places. Some of her favorite projects include curating a floating art parade, stilt walking while recording audio of people’s love of Chester Creek Trail, traveling with the Runaway Circus and Roustabout Circus, and street performing in Italy. She has taught with Chicago’s CircEsteem, Talkeetna’s Green Light Circus, Anchorage’s Winterberry Circus and through the Alaska Artist in Schools Program. Meghan is particularly interested in how lessons from the performing arts can engage citizens in community decision-making, and is always looking for ways to integrate arts strategies in her community development and planning work.

She began to explore the intersections of art and planning public spaces several years ago during Michael Gerace's curated assembly of artists for "The Berth Spot" in downtown Anchorage. At the time it was a natural spin-off of her work as a circus artist and occasional street performer. She realized that the ability to read a crowd is helpful for thinking about our public spaces. She returned to school and earned a master’s degree in environmental science with a concentration in environmental and community planning from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, where she studied the impact of the neighborhood environment on social connections and quality of life. While in school, she served as a member and finance coordinator for the Syracuse Public Arts Task Force, which acts as a catalyst for public arts in the city. During her work at Agnew::Beck, she worked as the “local researcher” for Cook Inlet Housing Authority’s Art Place Community Development Initiative program. For more than three years, she witnessed the incredible community and art work produced by the six organizations that received this $3 million dollar experimental funding opportunity.