PROJECT GIRL combines art, media literacy, and youth led activism. Project Girl is a ground-breaking girl-led, arts-based initiative created to enable youth to become better informed critical consumers of mass media advertising and entertainment. Our unique approach uses art as the means to educate, inspire, and create social change, giving girls the structure to be the producers of their own culture, not just passive receivers of a culture that is trying to sell them something.

Check Family Circle's feature of Project Girl- Art meets Activism! 

Our Team

Kelly Parks Snider, Co-Founder of Project Girl

Kelly explores contemporary cultural and social issues. Using art and words, she educates communities, stimulates dialogue about target issues and creates social change. As a visual artist, Kelly’s work exhibits nationally in public galleries. Kelly explores complex, highly charged issues in her new exhibition, using visual expression to comment on the invisible truths about power and privilege, inequality and injustice. Determined to make sense of these truths and shine a light on them, Parks Snider sought insights from leading thinkers on matters of racial, social and cultural concern, and individuals with first-hand experience of injustice stemming from them. 

Kelly is the co-founder of Project Girl (www.projectgirl.org), a nationally recognized non-profit, award-winning program and touring exhibition that combines art, media literacy and youth-led activism into a unique educational experience for children, parents and educators. Project girl was recently featured in Family Circle Magazine and was an awarded youth program in the new national youth empowerment and philanthropy program called Best Buy’s @15 Change Exchange project. Kelly is also the founder of Goathouse Press, an independent publishing company whose mission is to create literature with original insight and imagination that inspires new ways of seeing the world.

Activism is the foundation for all of Kelly’s endeavors. Her objective is to educate communities about targeted issues in the hopes of shaking up the status quo, creating a catalyst, examining the questions that shape and inspire all of us. Kelly lectures nationally about media literacy, serves in artist-in-residence programs and produces workshops. She lives and works on a little flower farm outside of Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband, and four children.

More more information see Kellyparkssnider.com

Jane Bartell, Co-Founder of Project Girl

Jane focuses on projects dedicated to arts support and advocacy.  Engendered with the belief that “the arts are for everyone” Bartell has applied her mass-marketing and promotional skills to select video projects through which she can help further the mission of groups and organizations endeavoring to expand the availability and life-enhancing influences of the arts.

Recent projects include Project Girl, an arts-based exploration and public exhibition focusing on the effects of media messages on the lives of adolescent girls, RURAL WOMEN: Voice & Spirit, a multi-media art exhibition focusing on the lives and issues of contemporary Wisconsin farm women, the annual Governor’s Awards in Support of the Arts, and commemorative video presentations for the Overture Center for the Arts, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, the Foundation for Madison Public Schools and the Wisconsin Broadcasters’ Association.