Europäische Jugendbildungs- und Jugendbegegnungsstätte Weimar

Denise Lee

She is a freelance civic education trainer and artist based in Leipzig working with youth and adults. She offers workshops in English and German in both the artistic field and the civic education field, sometimes in combination with each other.
Through these workshops, she aims to encourage curiosity about the world and how it works, and invite participants to understand and emotionally process their place within it. These workshops are designed to be interactive, combining pedagogical and creative methods with independent research and knowledge sharing from the participants themselves. She believes that active exchange and discussion are crucial for helping us understand who we share the world with and how we want to relate to one another.
For her civic education workshops, the topics she works with include democracy, race, BIPoC and migrant empowerment, allyship, gender, migration history, colonial history and memory culture. These topics are always accompanied by an intersectional and decolonial lens, along with an emphasis on media literacy. These workshops are suitable for high school-aged youth and adults, and are adjustable according to knowledge level.

In her artistic workshops, she works with participants to use sound, voice and creative writing to express or process their thoughts. She has also used these creative methods in order to help work through the topics in her civic education work.

The following are examples of workshops she has led in the past that demonstrate the scope of her work as well as how I combine creative and civic educational work:

Voices of loneliness and belonging
A series of artistic workshops using creative text, music and the voice to guide non-artists with a history of forced migration in expressing themselves and telling their own stories.

Echoes of the Brotherlands
A blended civic education and artistic workshop series working with youth to learn about the history of contract workers in the former GDR of East Germany. The workshops included interviewing contemporary witnesses and creating sound pieces from those interviews. The resulting work was shown at Haus Kultur der Welt in Berlin as a collaboration with mediale pfade.

Diaspora and Representation: Whose Story is it?
A civic education workshop that looks at how different groups of people are portrayed in media such as movies, visual art and the news, and attempts to draw lines between colonial history, migration patterns and global and local policies that affect us today.

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