People
S T A F F
B
Bianca Estrada is a passionate thespian, arts advocate, human rights activist, mother, and community organizer dedicated to uplifting marginalized communities. Born in Boyle Heights and raised between the United States and Mexico, Bianca holds several social science degrees, including a Social Welfare degree from UC Berkeley.
Jade
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Jade Adia is a reader and writer. She's the author of the YA novel, There Goes the Neighborhood, among other upcoming works. She holds a bachelor's degree in Ethnicity, Race & Migration, and a certificate in Human Rights. She recently survived law school, graduating with a specialization in Critical Race Studies.
Martha
Martha Escudero is a homeschooling mother of two daughters. She has a Bachelor's of Science in Gender, Ethnicity, and Multicultural Studies from Cal Poly Pomona University. As an activist, Martha works on housing as a human right, food justice, and prison abolition. She lived for two years among Mapuche people in a rural community in Wallmapu (Chile).
Alexi
Alexis Burgess is the chair of the Math department at Sequoyah High School in Pasadena. He co-founded Alcove in 2020, and now serves as its executive director. Educated at Harvard and Princeton, Alexi taught in the philosophy department at Stanford University from 2007 to 2015. He's also held visiting appointments at schools like UCLA, Pomona College, and NYU.
Benni
Benni Quintero is a multimedia teaching artist from South Central Los Angeles. They primarily work with hand-centric arts: sewing, crochet, stop-motion animation, sculpting, etc. But Benni does also get a kick out of digital compositing, digital drawing, and video editing. They have an Experimental Animation degree from CalArts stored in a box somewhere.
Hayden
Hayden Daigle is a poet, musician, and artist from Burbank, CA. A recent Alcove alum himself, Hayden now attends Pierce College, but comes back once a week to teach, mentor, and help facilitate the program. He plays guitar, drums, bass, and keys; and loves to share his knowledge of music composition and theory.
CJ
CJ Little is from Los Angeles and has always loved math. They've been working in education for several years now. To Cj, the best part of "knowing" anything is when you can make it known to other people, and the most fun part of enjoying something is when you can give other people access to enjoying it too.
Corinne
Corinne Taylor-Cyngiser finds joy in creating community. As a nonprofit administrator, consultant, board member, parent educator, PTA president, and leader of an all-gender scout troop, she sees the gifts in each person and loves to connect people and opportunities. She has a BA in Women’s Studies and certificates in nonprofit admin and parent education.
In addition to this core body of administrative, operational, and teaching staff, Alcove pays a living wage for ad hoc specialist instructors to offer weekly classes and workshops. These are mainly people from our personal and professional networks who appreciate our mission, and love working with kids who are showing up because they want to. The full roster of teachers is way too long to helpfully list here; and the current crop is evolving too quickly to keep updating. But over the years we've recruited experts in everything from music production to political science, 3D animation, geology, debate, aviation, cinematography, etc, etc, etc...
B O A R D
Adriana
Adriana Rincon is the newly appointed Director of the Family SourceCenters at El Centro Del Pueblo in Echo Park and Cypress Park. Before that, she was a coordinator for the Gang Reduction and Youth Development Program for the city of Los Angeles. She also serves on the Community Policing Advisory Board for LAPD. Adriana's passionate about serving her community in Northeast LA.
Cary
Cary McClelland is a writer, filmmaker, lawyer, and human rights advocate whose work has taken him around the world. His award-winning film Without Shepherds documented the lives of six different people fighting extremism in Pakistan. His book, Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley, was chosen as one of Stanford University's Three Books of 2019.
Chris
Christopher Hunter was an English professor at Caltech before taking a job as Director of STEM Leadership with the Ron Brown Scholar Program, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting talented and civic-minded African American high school and college students. Chris was born and raised in Los Angeles and educated at the LA Center for Enriched Studies, Harvard, and UPenn.
Haiwen
Haiwen Chu is an educational researcher focused on expanding educator expertise to enact quality mathematics instruction for students who are learning English as a second language. He was head counselor at the Ross Young Scholars Program in mathematics. And Haiwen is also interested in the pedagogy of apprenticeship in the transmission of classical Japanese sword arts.
Iris
Iris Chen is an author, unschooling mom of two, anti-oppression activist, and founder of the Untigering movement whose work centers on shifting from power-over to power-with relationships with children, especially among Asian communities. After sixteen years of living and raising her kids in China she now resides with her family in the Los Angeles area.