Introducing the 2023/2024 Teen Editorial Staff
TeenTix is proud to announce the 2023/2024 Teen Editorial Staff. This year's Teen Editorial Staff (TEDS) is comprised of five teens: Aamina Mughal, Anna Melomed, Audrey Gray, Daphne Bunker, and Kyle Gerstel.
The TEDS are the leaders of the TeenTix Newsroom, and work to curate reviews and arts coverage for the TeenTix blog. Teen Editorial Staff members decide which TeenTix Arts Partners' events to cover each month, write an editorial about their curatorial choices, and assign Newsroom writers to review each event. TEDS members interface with TeenTix Arts Partners to set up press tickets for each review, and edit all Newsroom writing before it is published on the TeenTix blog. The Teen Editorial Staff is a group of skilled writers, editors, and leaders, who keep the pulse of the TeenTix Press Corps and the Seattle arts scene.
Statement from this year's Teen Editorial Staff:
We, the Teen Editorial Staff, are committed to uplifting and nurturing youth voices. We believe in the inherent artistry of arts journalism and strive to elevate appreciation of the arts and critical thinking beyond what is taught in academic settings. Moreover, we believe that engagement with art is civic participation and is an avenue for teens to get involved in their community. In that same vein, we hope that our programming encourages teens and young adults to experience how joyful the arts world can be. Genuine empowerment of youth voices is dependent upon peer collaboration and mentorship, and we believe that we exemplify the steps towards this goal. In that way, we hope to provide a platform for marginalized voices and support our peers in harnessing their unique perspectives in their writing.
About the Teen Editors
Aamina Mughal
Aamina (she/her) In addition to being a teen editor at TeenTix, Aamina Mughal is a member of the Seattle Youth Poetry Fellowship, a bookseller, and a senior at Eastside Prep. This will be her second year as a TED and her third year as a part of the newsroom. Her journalistic work can be read on the TeenTix blog or on the encore spotlight and her poetry is available to read or is forthcoming in literary magazines like Blue Marble Review and the Kenyon Review. She is a lover of Taylor Swift and her hometown
Audrey Gray
Audrey (she/her) is a senior at Shorewood High School, where she’s involved with her school orchestra and Psychology Club. She worked as a Newsroom writer for TeenTix for two years, but has been passionate about creative media her whole life, writing about it informally even before she became involved in arts criticism. She loves the power of creative mediums in expressing and exploring the range of the human experience. In her free time, Audrey loves to play the violin, read, write creatively, and listen to new music—her favorite artistic medium. This is her second year as a TED.
Anna Melomed
Anna (she/her) is a junior at Juanita High School. She is an avid writer, reader, musician and film lover. Her interest in reviewing began at a young age where she would criticize Geronimo Stilton on Goodreads. Now she has moved into her nonfiction phase where some of her favorites feature Pachinko, A Little Life, Demon Copperhead. Outside of writing for TeenTix she has been playing piano for 11 years and has competed in various competition around the NW. Her dedication to music has led her to establish her own piano academy, where she has enjoyed to understand music from a teaching perspective. Anna believes that branching outside of the, school-taught, answer-a-question structure in writing can transform the way many people write and understand.
Daphne Bunker
Daphne (she/her) is a senior at the Downtown School. This is her second year with the TeenTix Newsroom and her first year as an editor. She’s an enthusiastic proponent of equity of access to the arts, and she thinks the best way to get to know a city is through its theaters, museums, and assorted artistic community centers. In addition to arts journalism, she loves frequenting Seattle's libraries and writing short stories, poems, D&D campaigns, and essays on American superhero comics.
Kyle Gerstel
Kyle (he/him) is a junior at Mercer Island High School, where he performs with the drama program and works on the school newspaper. This is his fourth year as part of the TeenTix Newsroom and second year as a TED. Outside of his work with TeenTix, Kyle is the Producing Artistic Director of Penguin Productions, a Seattle-based theater dedicated to producing pay-what-you-choose teen-driven shows as well as cultivating new works by teen playwrights. He likes Love Actually and The Social Network and dislikes 13 Going on 30 and when people sneeze loudly.
