Jessica Shaw has been the Theatre Arts Teacher and Director at Mount Vernon High School since August 2016. She began her full-time teaching career in 2009 at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia, where she taught music, theatre, and film to grades 5-12 for seven years. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Theatre from Villanova University, concentrating her studies in directing and theatre education, and a Bachelor of Music degree in Music Education from Grove City College, where she was awarded Magna cum laude with High Honors in Music and received the Music Education Award for excellence in the field of Music Education. Outside of MVHS, Jessica is a member of FCPS Pride and the FCPS Theatre Arts Directors' Association (TADA). She also has a passion for theatre curriculum development, presenting on it at both the 2015 Educational Theatre Association National Conference and the 2017 American Association for Theatre and Education National Conference, as well as serving on the VDOE 2020 Fine Arts Resources Development Committee, the VDOE 2019-2020 Fine Arts Standards of Learning Review Project Committee, the 2018 EdTA Model Curriculum Framework Project, and various FCPS Curriculum Project Teams for Theatre Arts and Technical Theatre. For more details, please visit Jessica's website at jsatryan.wixsite.com/jessicajoy.