Kentucky Soul

Workshops and Residencies

Teachers and Educators:

Yani is available for high-quality, standards-based arts experiences in your school!

Consider having Yani come and do workshops or a 1-5 day residency that combines music, dance,  with social studies, arts, cultural standards, and YOUR learning objectives, tailored to your specific classes. Yani has worked with students and schools for the past 13 years and he loves sharing his  passion for music, dance, culture, and the environment with teachers and students everywhere. Yani was a Peace Corps Volunteer (2000-02) and  is fluent in Spanish. He loves working with Spanish classes in designing lessons to compare and contrast  Kentucky culture, music and dance with  that of Latin America. 

Workshops can include: 

1.  Basic Songwriting

2.  Rhythm and Dance featuring group and individual dances from Kentucky, the Andes, Greece, Venezuela, Colombia.

3.  Folk music and instruments of the Americas (from Appalachia, American South, Caribbean, Central America, South America)

4.  Spanish lessons can be incorporated into any subject matter that teachers choose.

5.  College and Career Readiness

6. Sorghum cultivation, production and taking!

7. Basic Gardening and Sustainable Agriculture

Contact Yani to discuss which programs will be best for your classroom or school!

Guitar Classes

Yani has been teaching guitar classes at the Iroquois Library and Americana Community Center in Louisville since 2018.  These programs were made possible by the Imagine 2020 grant program administered by the Fund for the Arts.  The programs area focused on teaching students basic chords, riffs and songs in rock, classical, and pop music with some exploration of song composition.

If you are interested in guitar classes for your students, please send a message to Yani on the contact page.