North Star Performing Arts Camp
Music and performing arts workshops held in a daylong intensive where students work with acclaimed teaching artists in music, visual art, theater, poetry, and dance and come together at the end of the day to perform a work created that day in a showcase performance.
2025 Dates
November 1
Charles Schulz Museum
Time: 10AM – 5PM Showcase: 4 – 5PM
Ages: 13 – 18
This daylong intensive camp immerses students in a dynamic mix of music, dance, theatre, visual art, poetry, and clowning, all taught by our amazing teaching artists from around the Bay Area. Youth are encouraged to explore cross-disciplinary collaboration and creative expression in a supportive and fun environment.
NorthStar Teaching Artists
Erika Oba
Erika Oba is a composer, pianist/flutist, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. As a composer she has written works for jazz ensembles, chamber groups, orchestra, dance, and theater. She is active as a performer on both piano and flute, and performs with her own groups the Erika Oba Trio, Rice Kings, and The Sl(e)ight Ensemble. She has performed in a wide variety of ensembles with musicians including Meredith Monk, Peter Apfelbaum, Hitomi Oba, Lisa Mezzacappa, Jean Fineberg, Jon Jang, and Francis Wong. As an artist, she is interested in exploring cultural practice in diaspora, performance as ritual, and music as a vehicle for exploring our relationships to our communities, histories, and biosphere.
Margo Perin
Margo Perin’s book publications include Plexiglass; The Opposite of Hollywood; Only the Dead Can Kill: Stories from Jail; and How I Learned to Cook & Other Writings on Complex Mother-Daughter Relationships. Her poetry has been anthologized in numerous anthologies and exhibited at SebArts and Santa Rosa Arts Center. She is the poet of San Francisco’s public memorial Spiral of Gratitude and the Sonoma County Area Coordinator for California Poets in the Schools.
Tristan Cunningham
Tristan Cunningham Actor/Clown is a S.U.N.Y Purchase Theater Arts and Film Conservatory Graduate and a proud member of AEA and SAG-AFTRA. She has performed as an actor and clown all over the Bay Area and has won the 2016 TBA Outstanding Performance Award and the 2016 BATCC Excellence in Theater Award. Most recently she was in All Rise on CBS, The Fugitive starring Kiefer Sutherland, CSI Vegas, SWAT, 911, NCIS, Family Reunion, The Conners, American Auto, and is Toni in Reasonable Doubt on Hulu.
Tristan Cunningham steps so fully into each character that with each snap of a transformation you hold your breath, as if observing a magic trick” – SFGate.
Benjamin Donner (Nebula)
Benjamin Donner, also know as “Nebula”, is a professional Hip Hop/Street Dance Performer and Teacher. Ben has been perfecting his craft in the world of Hip Hop for the past 10 years, learning styles such as Popping, Turfing, Waving, Tutting, Roboting, Hip Hop Freestyle, and many other styles within the culture. Ben has participated as a competitive street dance freestyler nationally and in the online realm, winning competitions in the Bay Area and performing nationally on the west coast. Ben Donner was featured as the only soloist for “2023 San Francisco Hip Hop International Dance Festival”, performed as a Specialty Dancer for 2 nutcrackers “SSPA The Nutcracker (2022,2023)” and “Stuck Sander’s Hip Hop Nutcracker 2024”, became the winning champ for “World of Dance Bay Area 2025” and competed with “Aurajin” and placed Top 8 at “World of Dance Summit 2025”, has choreographed for “1up Crew”, “Aurajin”, and “Auxiliary Dance Team”, and is the owner of his own dance program, “Nebula Dance Program”. Ben has been teaching the youth of Sonoma County and Marin County for the past 5 years with a goal to create a fun and growth-focused environment where knowledge is the key pillar to building the next generation of creatives in the dance space, understanding and respecting the culture of Hip Hop Dance, and having the support to build potential careers in teaching, choreographing, or performing for the next generation.
Andi Wong
Teaching artist Andi Wong has a special interest in collaboration and exploring the materials and languages of art. As founder and project coordinator for ArtsEd4All (artsed4all.org), Andi organizes workshops, film screenings, community events, and explores how technology can help to build lasting connections. A fifth generation Chinese American, Andi researches and records history, helping to archive the important contributions of artists. Her creative partners include Del Sol Quartet; First Voice (Mark Izu and Brenda Wong Aoki); Internet Archive (DWeb Camp); The Last Hoisan Poets (Genny Lim, Flo Oy Wong and Nellie Wong); and composer musician Marcus Shelby.