studio creative play
OUR STUDIO FACULTY
KHAHTEE V. TURNER is the Founder & Executive Director of Studio Creative Play and The Roberts Field School. Khahtee is a community leader, an educational visionary, and a humanitarian and advocate for the propagation of the arts, creative enrichment, and compassionate awareness practices and offerings in early childhood. For the last 19 years at Studio—alongside artists, musicians, and educators—Khahtee has lead a unique, comprehensive, and transcendent community experience. Through its mission, Studio holistically nurtures the awakening and blooming of each individual’s voice and expressive capacity in the most sacred and salient time of formative development: early childhood.
Alongside the ongoing growth of Studio, Khahtee founded and co-directs The Roberts Field School, an elementary school. In the establishment of Roberts Field, she maintains her unwavering devotion to offer the community the tenets and practices of Studio through offering excellence in an interdisciplinary approach to academic elementary education. Khahtee has also taken her program worldwide to share these foundations of nurturing creative consciousness and interconnectivity with our global neighbors. She has taken educational experiences and resources to remote and underdeveloped areas of Mexico and Nepal, and has shared resources and global community workshops during her visits to Icelandic schools.
As Studio Creative Play Inc. extends its mission to offer peace, equity, and justice to many more learnings centers, this fall Khahtee begins in her role of Executive Director of SCP, launching the formal structure for SCP's new altruistic project, Peace and Equity in Education - Fall 2022. Khahtee can also be found spending fun times with her beloved fourteen-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter, adventuring in all that the world has to offer.
ROBIN PICKERING’s role as the Director of Programming gives her the opportunity to deepen her relationship with all things Studio and Roberts Field and to serve the Studio-RFS community, including families, children, and staff, on a daily basis. In her new role as a Venni Studio Supervisor, she looks forward to greater levels of connection and presence in the classrooms and strongly supporting the teachers logistically and philosophically in their fulfillment of the holistic mission of Studio.
She has been an active leader for Studio Creative Play in various capacities for over ten years, from editing content for the Studio Creative Play website, to helping produce educational videos and managing other large development projects. Over this decade plus of time, Robin’s work with SCP has also extended to global ports, such as traveling to Iceland and Mexico to further share Studio’s mission and curriculum with other schools, organizations, and communities, and to build ongoing partnerships with these groups.
Robin has been teaching yoga in Park Slope and NYC since 1999. She comes from an educational publishing background (English Language Arts for grades K-8, with a specialization in primary grade reading), and in publishing has edited and project managed everything from NYC test prep materials to phonics practice books to reading basals for grades K-12.
ANGUS DAVIDSON returns to Studio Creative Play as Assistant Director. In his five years with the organization, he’s served many roles, including teaching in the Venni Threes and Fours programs. He has taught music at all levels in the organization, also serving as a music ambassador in the Roberts Field School. He led the inaugural year of the Roberts Field Symposium program, an interdisciplinary arts class for elementary schoolers. His favorite part of his current role at Studio is the opportunities he has to connect with every class in the community every day. He loves the work of building Studio’s community and supporting the teachers in their work. His own teaching experience has spanned ESL kindergarten and elementary school, music lessons, choral direction, outdoor education, and classroom teaching.
Angus graduated from Hampshire College in 2014 with a BA in music and a concentration in piano performance and conducting. Angus was a candidate for the Ottorino Respighi Prize in Conducting at the inaugural New York Conducting Workshop, and he attended the Yarn/Wire Institute, a new music program for pianists, percussionists, and composers, at Stony Brook University in 2017. He and Gigi Chew, longtime Studio teacher and parent, co-founded Spark Arts, a summer program for children drawing on their love of art, music, and nature.
When he’s not teaching, Angus loves playing music, taking photos, writing, and canoeing.