Erika Halstead is the Executive Director at Minds Matter NYC. She has been involved with the organization since 2009, first as a Writing & Critical Thinking adviser and then as a member of the Board of Directors, serving as Vice Chair from 2013 to 2015, and became Executive Director in 2015. Erika has spent her entire career in education, as a bilingual teacher, university lecturer in multi-ethnic/multicultural literature, and most recently as the Senior Program Officer at Humanities New York where she directed education and community engagement programs, and created programming for Latinx and American Muslim communities used nationwide. She is also an expert facilitator and master trainer in facilitation, with experience training hundreds of people in best practice. She comes to Minds Matter with a wealth of experience in program development and evaluation and a deep knowledge of programming for underserved youth. She holds a BA from the University of Texas at Austin and a EdM from Teachers College, Columbia University. A proud Colombian-American, she was named a 40 Under 40 Rising Star by the Hispanic Coalition of New York in 2018.