Allen Riley

This month’s installment of our Staff Spotlight series features our Learning Production Advisor, Allen Riley. As an Advisor, Allen is supporting Beam Center leadership and staff with program design, metrics, and exploring our framework and approach.

Allen started working at Beam Camp back in 2007, where he served as a Camp Counselor, Project Designer, and Domain Guest. As a domain guest Allen co-created a Barbarian movie with campers. Allen stated that he felt “very trusted” delivering on the project he proposed and received a lot of help from staff at Camp. He added, “I was trusted to bring and deliver my idea at Camp, and it really established a trusting relationship with everyone at Beam.”

At first Allen didn’t know what to expect from Beam Camp, but he said he liked the idea of having bold expectations for kids - like using drills - and wanted to work at Camp to see that happen. Allen said, “I was interested in the bold expectations that they had for kids. I really liked the idea of kids figuring out how to do stuff at a young age and being able to bring that with them throughout their lives and having these moments of making something that you can remember.” Allen recalls some of memories from his childhood and adds, “Some of my happiest memories of childhood have to do with making music with friends and figuring out stuff.”

When asked what he thinks is special about Beam Center, he said, “One thing that’s unique about Beam is that it’s a combination of being a really strong vision, combined with really responding to the interest of the people who join Beam and openness to change and adaptation. We’re trusting young people to make something that’s meaningful and really trusting them to share it with others. But we also trust the adult staff who get involved and trust them to make a positive impact and to change the organization.”

Along with being an employee at Beam, Allen currently is a full time Ph.D. student in film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is an electronic media artist working in participatory video and signal flow, and he has recently created two movies, The Grateful Undead and Doomed, the latter of which was screened at the Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn.

Speaking about his practice and his decision to continue his studies, Allen says “I went back to school because I was seeing that there were a lot of connections between the things that I was getting involved with at Beam Center in terms of thinking about the practice and some of the ideas about filmmaking and media making that I was getting into with my artwork. [The connections have] always been there, it goes back to making these movies and my domains [at Camp] and everything. I was seeing an opportunity to use the school as a framework for further developing what that connection is and doing some more thinking and writing and art making around that.”