Creative Allies is a new Neighborhood Arts program where artists work in a one-year artist residency with residents to amplify their voices for community development efforts in partnership with City departments.

Creative Allies partners one artist per City department and per neighborhood to provide arts-led and community-based efforts to facilitate deeper engagement, planning, and creative problem-solving for departments. The goal is to help these City departments align the municipality’s efforts with community histories and needs with an emphasis on equity and centering historically marginalized voices. Read more about the residency

2024-2025 Artists in Residence - Jada Weathers and Jessica Jackson

The inaugural Neighborhood Arts: Creative Allies program partners Jada Weathers with Neighborhood Development and the Dudley Heights neighborhood, and Jessica Jackson with the Human Rights Department and the Kings Forest neighborhood. Weathers has chosen Community Land Trusts as her program area and Jackson has chosen to focus on the International Advisory Committee.

Jada Weathers is a singer-songwriter and educator who was raised in Greensboro. She began songwriting at age 12 as a student at the Academy of Lincoln where she was a member of the gospel choir. Weathers, whose stage name is J Da Storm, performed her first single “Fantasy” at the Pasos Con event in Dallas, TX in 2022. Weathers has performed locally at the both the StrangeFruit and ACE Spirit Week Festivals. Her debut EP is set to be released later this year.

Weathers has also been the Education, Inclusion and Community Engagement manager at the High Point Arts Council, taught middle school and high school English, and spent four years as director of Community Outreach for Pasos of Oak Cliff, a Dallas, TX based non-profit that provides culturally relevant educational programs in minority communities. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a master’s degree in education from Southern Methodist University.

“I am so excited to work with Creative Allies in the Dudley Heights neighborhood,” said Jada Weathers. “I am a proud Dudley High School graduate, and many of my family members lived in the neighborhood. This residency is an opportunity to give back to the community that has shaped me into the artist and creative I am now.”

Jessica Jackson, a native of Greensboro, is a self-taught visual artist and a research scientist in molecular biology. She has exhibited work at the Paddison Memorial Library in Kernersville, NC; The Center for Visual Artists 100 x 100 Annual Fundraiser, and is currently on exhibit in the UPROOT: BIPOC Visions for an Equitable Food Systems exhibit in Durham, NC. She is a participating artist in the Black Women’s Art Collective, which received a grant from the North Carolina Arts Council in 2022 for the exhibit “Seeing Ourselves” at the Center for Visual Artists.

Jackson also served on the board of directors for the Renaissance Cooperative Grocery Store and was a community canvasser, helping Greensboro residents affected by the tornado in 2018 connect to resources and assistance. She manages lab operations as a research technician at Wake Forest Baptist Medical, and has both a B.S. in Chemistry and an M.S. in Medical Science from Hampton University. Jackson is also a graduate of Dudley High School.

“I get to align my desire to do community-based work with art and more deeply incorporate it into my art practice,” said Jessica Jackson. “This residency is also an opportunity to elevate lesser heard voices and use creativity to open the door to innovative problem-solving rather than attempting to address issues in the same ways. I am very excited to grow in my artistic journey and engage residents.” 

Neighborhood Arts supports artists and residents as co-leaders to connect communities with creativity. The program brings creative experiences close to home through arts activities and beautification projects that respond to neighborhood priorities. The program focuses on the five communities of the Housing GSO Plan: Dudley Heights, Glenwood, Kings Forest, Mill District, and Random Woods. The neighborhoods chosen for the program were identified for reinvestment in that plan.