My name is Bri Castellini, and while I used to tell my grandmother (who has wanted me to be a teacher since I was five) I would never step foot in the education world, as an adult I’ve found myself almost exclusively working in education in one way or another. Reflecting upon my vehement assurance that I would never be a teacher, I think what I was really reacting to was the fact that my public school education was not what you’d call a situation I wanted to linger in.
However, the older I get and the more I experience learning from people who want to teach and share knowledge, the more I realize that education and teaching isn’t as linear as it appeared to be back in the early 2000s while I was embedded myself. Which is why you’ve noticed me apply to as many Crash Course openings as I’ve seen on LinkedIn and social media, because Crash Course was one of the projects that started to thaw my frozen anti-working-in-education heart. What really unlocked my genuine and full-throated interest in education professionally was when I watched how Crash Course made learning into a storytelling exercise, letting creativity of curriculum lead rather than rote memorization and a dry recitation of facts and dates. As a life-long writer and storyteller myself with now two writing degrees under my belt and crushing me with student debt, this really appealed to me.
Since grad school, I have taught at the graduate level as an adjunct and as a substitute and guest speaker, I have developed classes for multiple tech start ups as both a full-time employee/community manager as well as on a freelance basis, and I have consulted in an educational capacity fairly regularly along the way.
Before my more traditional education work experience, I was with MTV as an Associate Producer, where much of my job was writing and researching pitches as well as writing scripts and copy for various digital projects. I’m also an award winning independent filmmaker in my own right, with a notable project being Ace and Anxious, a short film that was previously distributed by RevryTV and currently has 155k views on YouTube. Before YouTube eliminated the dislike counter, my like-to-dislike ratio was one of the most heartening things I’d ever seen on the platform!
And before even that, I was a competitive public speaker for 6 years during high school and college, which I credit with fundamentally changing the course of my life for the better. Learning public speaking, rhetoric, debate, and everything in between made me a better writer, a better thinker, and absolutely a better person to be around. A person who could understand my own convictions and express them confidently to those around me while also remaining open to new ideas and concepts.
I’m a self-starter, an award-winning screenwriter, comfortable managing multiple courses at a time, working alone or with a team, and have a track record of students who started my class skeptical (and in some cases downright hostile) and ended it excited to continue their learning with me and beyond. I also once, semi-relatedly, wrote an academic article in college about the Nerdfighteria community as a fellow at the Berglund Center for Internet Studies. I attended the first VidCon, I had a years-long collab channel with fellow Nerdfighters who all met on Your Pants, and I would love to be a part of the educational arm of your incredible community that has enriched my life in more ways than one.