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The 2023 O+ Festival is a wrap! Thank you to our volunteers, providers, participants, and community for another great year.
The 2023 O+ Festival is a wrap! Thank you to our volunteers, providers, participants, and community for another great year.
Joe Concra is a painter and original O+ founder. His work examines glimmers of hope and the illuminated edges using the classic techniques of oil painting, with which he creates worlds both familiar and skewed by dreamlike absurdity. His work is held in private collections throughout the U.S. and U.K.
After meeting a local dentist in 2010, he focused on creating a group art project which combines art, music, and healthcare for artists and musicians, a seriously under-insured part of the population. A yearly festival evolved that helped to fill a cultural void that was life in Kingston. He believes art, music, and healthcare are essential to our community’s well-being.
Dr. Lizette Edge is a Board-Certified Family-Practice Physician who strives to provide loving and patient-centered care. She has 10+ years of experience working in Hudson Valley hospitals, both at Ellis Hospital and Kingston Hospital, where she delivered care to individuals from the ER, which included being on the ground throughout the entire Covid-19 pandemic.
Lizette was born in Bogota, Colombia, and moved to the U.S. at the age of 9, living as an undocumented immigrant for her first 10 years. Her experiences growing up in the 80s and 90s Bogota during the drug wars, working in the privatized U.S. medical system, and being a traveling doctor abroad within hospitals with very limited resources, have all shaped her belief that health, especially access to primary care, is a human right.
For the last 5 years, Lizette has been happy to call Kingston home. When she is not working, you can find her in the Catskill Mountains or in a body of water – especially the ocean on a surfboard. Lizette has volunteered with the O+ Festival for the last three years and is thrilled to join the team and be a part of opening a clinic that will serve the community she loves.
Aimee is an educator and arts administrator and serves as the Operations Director for O+. She helped launch the festival in San Francisco and Petaluma, CA. Her experience in community empowerment extends back to her role as Curriculum Director for the Technovation program, which provides young women around the world the framework to solve problems in their communities by developing technological solutions. She produced video content and designed education programming around the “Revolution: 2000 Years of Computing History” exhibition at the Computer History Museum and has worked as an instructional designer for CUNY to design seminars around New York City and the arts, technology, science, and the future of NY.
Aimee holds an MA in Germanic Languages and Literature from the CUNY Graduate Center and a BA in the same field from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Lindsey is an artist, educator, writer, and arts administrator. She was born and raised in the Detroit, MI area where she was first struck by the ways that built structures, like people, carry the impact of the present, future, and past concurrently. Wolkowicz received her BFA in Painting from Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and her MFA in Painting/Drawing from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY where she remained for a decade before relocating to the Hudson Valley in early 2017. Drawing has always been at the center of her practice, but Wolkowicz works in the realms of photography, public murals, sculpture, video, and, notably, performance installation through her ongoing collaborative projects with her partner, Dillon Paul.
Lindsey Wolkowicz became the Art Director of O+ in early 2021. She is a 2018 O+ alumni artist. She has taught drawing in various settings for elementary through adult learners around the world and has exhibited her work internationally. She is also proud to be a recent recipient of recognition for her work supporting the arts within her own community, including the 2022 YWCA’s Women Who Roar for the Y Honoree and the 2022 Kingston Midtown Arts District Red Goat Award for outstanding service to the arts. Wolkowicz lives and works in Kingston with her partner and their daughter.
Lara Hope is a multi-festival O+ alum musician, super-volunteer, stage manager, merch maven, and former music committee member. As the O+ Music Co-Director (Programming) Hope brings her personal experience as a Hudson Valley-based musician to the annual festival and year-round music programming in partnership with Music Co-Director Laura Crimmins.
Hope has played the role of band leader, songwriter, manager, booker, and promoter in her bands Lara Hope & The Ark-Tones and The Gold Hope Duo for over a decade. She is an active touring musician who has been recognized with a prestigious Ameripolitan Music Award (2017), a “40 Under 40 Award” from SUNY New Paltz (2019), and was the proud recipient of the 2020 City Of Kingston’s Distinguished Artist Award. Between her experience as a touring musician and her heartfelt, proven commitment to providing access and opportunities to her fellow musicians, Hope brings an invaluable perspective to the O+ Team.
Laura Crimmins is the Music Co-Director (Production), bringing her personal experience as a Hudson Valley-based musician to O+ in partnership with Lara Hope. She is an O+ music alum, creative small business owner, designer, merch maker, fiddle player, vocalist, mom, and gardener.
Crimmins has a deep and longstanding commitment to working on behalf of the wellness of our local community. She has been essential to the growth of the Kingston Farmers Market in recent years and balances experience in performance, administration, festival production, farming, local food, and community building. Crimmins brings myriad skills, including over 15 years of production/tour management experience, infectious energy, and a hands-on approach to all production at O+ from music to the festival as a whole.
Jesse Scherer is a licensed massage therapist practicing in uptown Kingston. She has been with the O+ clinic since the festival’s beginning in 2010 and now serves as the Festival Clinic coordinator. Jesse has degrees in psychology and philosophy and brings that wisdom to all her endeavors.
Jesse is a founding member of local organizations pushing for equity and social transformation, including Radical Women’s Action Team, Social Change for Women, local Transition networks, alternatives to the military, Joppenbergh Mountain preservation organization, and the ever-eclectic Rosendale Improvement Association Brass Band and Social Club. She has been instrumental in several local health organizations including The Holistic Health Community and Healthcare is a Human Right! She is a minister of Maat under the guidance of IONE.
Jesse is always looking for new ways to collaborate with people to bring equity, activism, truth and fun to the center of the community. As a longtime networker and innovative thinker, Jesse is able to provide resources and resilience to the act of exchanging the medicine of art for the art of medicine.
Theresa Lyn Widmann is a Sound Facilitator and Holistic Coach who loves supporting others to heal, dream, and thrive. She is the host of I Want What She Has, a podcast and weekly live radio show at Radio Kingston dubbed the “antidote to the patriarchy,” amplifying women’s voices and their stories. She shares her passion for community building and activism as the Chair of Live Well Kingston’s Heal Well Focus Group, as a Member of the YWCA Ulster County Advisory Committee, as a member of the Ulster County Conviction Integrity Unit, and as a volunteer practitioner with the Holistic Health Community.
Widmann is the former Festival Director and Board President for the O+ Festival and was instrumental in the initial growth of the ExplO+re programming at O+ Festival. She believes in the supreme power of compassion to heal ourselves and our community and is driven by this defining principle in all her work.
Erin Edge is an editor, writer, and content strategist. She studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and spent the last decade at Healthline.com, most recently serving as editor-in-chief and leading a world-class team of writers and editors working to make health information more inclusive, accurate, and accessible to all. Erin’s work in the health & wellness field has been guided by the belief that everyone deserves culturally competent, affirming, and affordable care. After hearing friends and family sing the praises of O+ for years, she volunteered at her first festival in 2022 and got to see the exchange in action. She’s excited to join the communications team to help bring the O+ mission to life through storytelling.
A born Midwesterner, she lived in Oakland, California for 10 years before relocating to Kingston to be closer to family as she began her own parenting journey and currently lives in Midtown with her husband, daughter, and sweet senior pitbull. When she’s not running after her toddler, you can find her slow-walking her elderly dog around town, devouring a book, and (awkwardly) attempting to make friends with other new parents.
Allison Young is a musician, curator, event planner and artist manager based in Kingston, NY. She grew up outside of Ithaca, NY, where her passion for the arts was fueled through a robust performance scene that ranged from large-scale music festivals to theater to DIY punk shows.
After completing her study at Binghamton University and Utrecht University, she became an administrative assistant at Basilica Hudson, ultimately advancing to venue manager. She now serves as Basilica Hudson’s seasonal curator for Jupiter Nights, a summer series celebrating regional artists through concerts and art exhibitions. In addition to managing artists independently and through Zone 6, Allison self-released her debut EP Changeling in March 2023 as Allie Young.
Alanna Coby is a playwright, teaching artist and grant writer/development consultant. Her work has been celebrated by the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Award, the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, the Jane Chambers Award for Excellence in Feminist Playwriting, The Civilians, Mabou Mines, The Drama League, Catskill Mountain Shakespeare, ShoutOut Saugerties, Dixon Place, SITI Company, The Brick, and IRT Theater. She is a proud founding member of The Syndicate, an ensemble theatre company producing new plays by women, queer, and trans+ artists, as well as the creator of Cooking Rage, a satire cooking blog, and Ugly Comics, a comic series about the creative process. Colby has taught playwriting at Sarah Lawrence College and the Eileen Fisher Leadership Institute, and currently writes grants for YWCA Ulster County and One Whale’s Tale.
