40th Annual Tampa-Hillsborough County Storytelling Festival
Lorien Mattiacci has been involved with the storytelling festival since she was nine years old and a student storyteller herself. She has held many roles from performer (live in-person events, radio, television and online video) to organizer (committee member since 2001) to project manager (helping to build the ambassador and teaching programs) to educator (teaching the storytelling curriculum to underserved youth through libraries, community centers and the HOST after-school program).
See samples of Lorien’s contributions to this year’s festival immediately below and scroll to the bottom of the page to learn more about her prior work with the festival.
Project Management
Lorien has been helping to plan the festival since 2001. She also helped to create the program—from ideation to implementation—to bring professional storytellers into community centers to work with underserved youth. She hired the artists and trained the storytellers and community center staff on how to work together to best serve the students. She developed the curriculum and supervised the implementation, running interference to remove barriers and resolve conflicts. (In true project management fashion, she had to rely on leadership skills over nonexistent authority with these diverse teams.)
Event Planning
Lorien played a key role in planning the 2021 storytelling festival. She served on the planning committee and helped to pivot the festival from a 100% in-person experience into a 100% online experience while maintaining the integrity of the festival’s mission: to facilitate literacy in underserved youth while supporting the storytelling community and engendering awareness of storytelling as an oral tradition and performance art. She accomplished this by planning four live (online) events with the public library, an 11-video series of educational videos and two live (online) coaching sessions for participants.
Story School
Lorien created Story School to fulfill the education objectives of the festival’s mission. Lorien produced story school from concept to finished product. She planned the curriculum based on literacy best practices and her years of experience as an educator and storyteller. She recruited a team, determined the scope, timeline and resources, helped script the videos, filmed, edited and submitted all eleven videos for publication on deadline and within budget. Now, anyone in the the world (with internet access) interested in storytelling has the free resources to pursue their dreams and participate in the festival.
Education and Communication
Lorien’s favorite thing about project management is that it often allows her to exercise her leadership skills in her two favorite domains: education and communication. The storytelling festival is no exception.
Storytelling Coach
Lorien loves working with students. In storytelling, she gets to use her literacy expertise (she is state certified to teach K-12 reading) to design high-value educational experiences for students that are pure fun (and in no way high-stakes-test-y).
Community Building
This year, Lorien created a festival email where interested people can opt in to a mailing list. Lorien leads the email efforts, manages the mailing list and creates and shares the email campaigns for the festival.