Magazine

When Natalia Romero Arbeláez ’15 was selected to become one of the inaugural faculty members leading the new GreenRoom Fellowship at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, she was thrilled at the opportunity to share her expertise in musical theater.

And when organizers asked her to recommend other talented artists of color who could help lead and inspire a new generation of performers, Romero Arbeláez knew exactly where to turn: fellow Oles Denzel Belin ’15 and Jared Miller ’17.

Belin is a longtime cast member and writer at The Brave New Workshop, and Miller has developed a career as a professional pianist and music teacher. The three worked together on a Lyric Theater production at St. Olaf College a decade ago, and have collaborated many times over the years.

“My favorite pianist to work with is Jared Miller,” Romero Arbeláez told staff members at the Ordway. “And I have this friend Denzel who does everything — improv and acting, stand-up and hosting — and he’s so great.”

Soon all three St. Olaf alumni were on the program’s faculty and playing an instrumental role in launching GreenRoom, a paid six-week musical theater fellowship created to nurture artists of color. Beyond just teaching musical theater, the faculty members are tasked with building up Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and other artists who are underrepresented in an industry where they face more barriers to entry.

Established by the Ordway in 2022, the GreenRoom Fellowship is open to dancers, singers, and actors of any age group. Housed at one of the country’s leading nonprofit performing arts centers and led by exceptional instructors, it’s a highly competitive fellowship that attracts top talent. So it was especially exciting, Romero Arbeláez says, when not one, but two current St. Olaf students were among the 11 artists selected for the GreenRoom Fellowship last summer.

For students Yolanda Pauly ’25 and Paulina Morera Quesada ’24, the opportunity was a dream come true. The fellowship not only provided hands-on experience in the performing arts, but the chance to connect with professionals in Minnesota’s theater and arts scene.

“I’ve never felt so lucky in my life,” says Pauly, who is majoring in dance with a race and ethnic studies concentration.

To have instructors who are St. Olaf graduates was equally amazing, says Morera Quesada, who is majoring in Inclusivity in the Performing Arts, an individual major developed through the St. Olaf Center for Integrative Studies.

“It was very sweet to know that these are people of color who went to St. Olaf and are making it. And now they’re teaching me,” Morera Quesada says.

Creating a Supportive Space
The GreenRoom Fellowship, led by the Ordway’s Maia Maiden, provides students with a stipend of $2,500 and help with transportation to the performing arts center, which is located in downtown St. Paul. Students attend classes daily from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and the program culminates in a performance at the end of the summer. About 200 guests gathered in the Ordway concert hall last August to watch the group perform two improv sketches and musical numbers to open and close the show. Each fellow individually performed a song or monologue and presented a two-minute TED Talk. 

Twenty-one fellows have participated in GreenRoom since its inaugural year in 2022. Fellows from the program’s first and second years are already making strides toward professional careers — Belin even worked with a fellow last fall on a Twin Cities Horror Fest show. 

GreenRoom instructors spend time with students working on music, dance, and acting techniques, as well as strategies for performing musical theater in a way that’s healthy and sustainable. The goal of the program is to address a question that is simultaneously simple and complex: “How can we create an empowering, safe, sacred space to just exist as people in the theater community whose stories aren’t always told or embraced?” says Romero Arbeláez, who is the choir and musical theater director at The Blake School in Minneapolis. 

“This is beautifully hard work. Creating something from the ground up with undeniable authenticity, excellence, and impact on multiple levels is challenging — but it is so important, joyous, and amazing.”

Ordway Director of Arts Learning and Community Engagement Maia Maiden

In his GreenRoom class on improv and auditioning, Belin discusses singing songs that weren’t written by or for diverse people, and the kinds of stories about one’s cultures that are available — and whether they were written by people who share it. These discussions feel different and powerful in rooms that put racial diversity at the forefront, he says. 

“A lot of what I do with my teaching of improvisation is not necessarily one of the three core skills of musical theater — it’s not singing, acting, or dancing. But it makes you a better person in the room,” says Belin, who in addition to his acting is also a staff writer for AWF magazine.

Miller and Romero Arbeláez co-teach singing and vocal technique in a class called “Finding Your Story.” Over the course of the program, they help their students put together well-rounded audition binders that show a range of skills based on their experiences with audition panels.

Miller coaches the fellows on setting reasonable standards for themselves as artists, how to handle performance anxiety, and how to face the disappointment that comes with their chosen career. 

“You have to audition. You have to get rejections. Sometimes it might be a longer string of rejections before you get a success. How do you take that and learn from it?” Miller says.

Maiden, the director of arts learning and community engagement at the Ordway, says those are exactly the type of lessons she hoped to provide young artists when she founded GreenRoom. 

“This is beautifully hard work. Creating something from the ground up with undeniable authenticity, excellence, and impact on multiple levels is challenging — but it is so important, joyous, and amazing,” Maiden says. “When I approached Natalia, Jared, and Denzel, they not only had to believe in me as a new director at the Ordway but also that this fellowship was going to work. I had to believe in them bringing their extraordinary talents in the performing arts to teaching in this modality, not to mention their ability to rock this. We decided to take this reciprocal belief and ride down this road together. The result? Wonderful fellows like Paulina and Yolanda who knew they wanted more and believed GreenRoom was the perfect space to make that happen.”

In the first few weeks of last summer’s fellowship, GreenRoom students were quiet as they weighed how competitive it would be and focused on getting as much from the program as possible. As the weeks went on, everyone became closer, willing to help one another through their struggles by sharing strengths, Morera Quesada says. 

“It was so beautiful. And we got to know each other so well. It helped me visualize my life as an artist in a different way,” Morera Quesada adds. 

In those classrooms a weight was taken off of their shoulders, says Pauly. There was no need to exhaust herself and her emotions by explaining how it has impacted her to not have a wide range of Black or Latino dance professors. It felt liberating to have these shared experiences and to feel confident in being a woman of color, she adds. 

“They understood,” Pauly says. “It’s just so incredible when you have those moments — when you have people who look like you around you.”

As graduation and the professional dance world approaches, Pauly says she now feels excited and confident to enter it as her full self.

“If I can get up on this absolutely magnificent, absolutely beautiful, incredible stage in the Ordway that seats over 1,000 people, I feel very confident and ready to take the steps of applying to an audition or an open call,” she says.

Raising Each Other Up
The three St. Olaf alumni say it was powerful to work with students of color coming from their alma mater. Although they appreciate the efforts they have seen St. Olaf make in recent years to create a more inclusive community, they note that many of the conversations within GreenRoom would have been difficult to have on campus even a decade ago.

Belin was one of just two Black theater majors in his class at St. Olaf, and he balanced theater productions and internships with the campus work study and summer jobs he needed to cover his tuition. Miller pushed to make space for the Spanish classical music he wanted to learn amid a focus on Germanic and Russian piano composers. Romero Arbeláez fought to music direct the musical In the Heights as a Colombian immigrant while struggling to pay for school. 

It’s part of why a paid fellowship like GreenRoom is so crucial — it allows students to focus on developing their craft rather than worry how they’ll pay for gas or public transit to get to the Ordway or how they’ll pay for college without a summer income. 

“If I can get up on this absolutely magnificent, absolutely beautiful, incredible stage in the Ordway that seats over 1,000 people, I feel very confident and ready to take the steps of applying to an audition or an open call.”

Yolanda Pauly ’25

Belin points out that there was a time when theaters would ask assistant directors to work nearly full-time without stipend. “That is a very select group of people who can afford to do that. And so rarely is that a diverse group of people. Limiting the amount of financial sacrifice that you have to do so that you can bring your full self into the room is, frankly, revolutionary,” he says.

In some ways, sharing their own life experience and the barriers they faced was cathartic for the group of instructors. 

“I’m 30. I don’t particularly consider myself to be the end-all expert. But also, I truly don’t believe you have to be an expert in order to dialogue, to share your gifts. I may not have all the answers, but I have some of them. And I know I’m really damn good at improvisation,” Belin says.

Within Minnesota’s predominantly white performing community, it feels crucial for a program like GreenRoom to exist, Miller adds. 

“I think it’s important to have a program that is not for white people where the artists can come and see that they do belong, and there are people who are like them who also belong and are succeeding in a place that sometimes doesn’t feel like it’s for them,” Miller says. 

The GreenRoom instructors were able to work with fellows on creating a space and community that felt good, affirming, and safe, says Romero Arbeláez. 

“It was really special to be able to see them grow, and for us to grow as educators, and then to get to see them at the showcase where they just sang and performed so beautifully,” she says. 

Most days last summer, Miller and Romero Arbeláez left class and ended up talking for a half hour or so, to debrief and discuss what they would do the next day, Miller says. They work hard — but have such a good time together it often does not feel like work, he says. 

Since graduation, Miller has already worked with St. Olaf professors who now see him as a professional colleague. Even within GreenRoom, by the end of the summer, their students were their professional colleagues, too, Belin adds. 

As the final GreenRoom performance approached, Romero Arbeláez and Belin stood backstage together, she recalls. They snapped a photo of one another beneath a sign that read “The Ordway Concert Hall, Stage Right Entrance.” In the photos, they were both grinning.

“We just looked at each other, like, we’re here,'” she says. “We went to this tiny little school in Northfield, Minnesota, and now here we are in a professional concert hall at the Ordway, backstage together. Because I got the gig and what did I do? I raised up my friends. And here we are together.”