About Me | twinkletoes-music

Bio

Born in the city of Opole, Poland, Dorota Xeller found her way to Madison more than a decade ago—and the area is all the richer for it.

She heads the Early Childhood Department at Neighborhood Music School (NMS), offering music and movement classes for ages birth

through 6; is on a parent engagement committee there; runs her own children’s music and dance company called Twinkletoes; teaches a class called Yoga Musical Adventures; and is also the birthday party coordinator at NMS—her own idea.

“Twinkletoes is something I established when a lot of centers reached out to me last year after I did a presentation for NAEYC,” the National Association for the Education of Young Children, Dorota explains. “NAEYC is something a lot of preschools get accredited by. I did a presentation, a two-hour lecture and kind of a concert, to a lot of professionals from the greater New Haven area, and all the directors of preschools from the area were there. After that they started reaching out to me in terms of, ‘We need you to come to our school.’ Just the fact that I was asked to make a presentation as part of professional development—mostly directors and faculty take those professional development hours—was a very big privilege for me to do. After that, my name spread around the New Haven area, and a lot of schools reached out to me. I was so caught up with being the head of the department at the music school and teaching classes on top of that, I needed to kind of separate that and do things on my own as well. That’s why I established sole proprietorship. I negotiated contracts individually with all the centers in the greater New Haven area.”

The program involves enriching their regular, daily curriculum by providing music, singing, and instrument exposure to young children.

As for her work with NMS, its Early Childhood Department’s outreach program also brings music to local daycare centers like Yale School of Medicine’s Phyllis Bodel Childcare Center and Circle Nursery School in Madison. The birthday party program combines music, dance, and a music-related art project for children aged 3 to 8.

Poland to New York

Dorota’s first trip to the states was in 2000.

She says, “I came just for the summer to visit friends of mine, and I was actually finishing my thesis for my master’s in poetry. So I came back in 2002, finished my master’s, and I decided to go back for another summer, and I stayed ever since. It’s been 12 years. I’m new to the country. I was born and raised in Poland. My family is still back there. My parents live in Poland; my brother lives in Qatar. We visit each other every year.”

Dorota enjoyed a storied singing career before she came to Madison. She holds a B.A. in voice (she’s a soprano), has been trained in opera and piano, and spent 16 years in Schola Cantorum Opoliensis Legenda performing as a soloist in most of the European countries. While living in New York City, she sang for two years in St. Cecilia’s chorus performing at Carnegie Hall.

“My first singing experience started in a chorus I joined when I was six in Poland,” Dorota says. “At that time, Poland was under communism, and I was lucky enough to get into a group that would travel all around the world, whereas nobody was really allowed to have a passport back then.”She vividly remembers traveling to Belgium to sing in a music festival at age 7.

“I could not speak any other language. I was learning Russian at school because everybody had to, but we would stay with families for over a month, and I would have to communicate. So that’s how I picked up all the languages.”

Dorota is fluent in English and Polish and speaks a little Spanish, Russian, and German.

She continues, “I remember when I came back home, my teacher canceled the class and wanted me to tell the whole school what it was like to be in the western world. I was the only one in a school of approximately 600 students who was allowed a passport to Western Europe instead of Eastern Europe. That kind of grew on me because going away every year and singing all around Europe was a great experience for me in terms of learning other languages, but also learning other cultures and being exposed to arts and culture.”

In 2005, she found herself on stage singing at Carnegie Hall.

“That was at the very end of my singing career because I was already living in New York,” she says. “I was actually nine months pregnant, standing on the stage for an hour and a half singing Requiem.”

New York to Madison

Dorota and her husband, Robert, met in Branford. Robert works for Job Corps helping 17- to 21-year-olds learn trades. They have two children, Mya and Ryan. After Ryan was born, Dorota taught at Indian Neck School in Branford, which allowed her to be with her son daily.

“I was a parent educator there, and I was running a playgroup for parents and working together with ages birth to 3 trying to help assess children and give parents information about what’s available for them if they need any resources. At that time, I met Rob and we started dating. We got married in 2009.”

Mya, Dorota’s step-daughter, and Ryan are both 10. Robert, Dorota, and Ryan now live full-time in Madison. Ryan attends Island Avenue, and Mya lives primarily with her mother in North Haven but visits two days a week.

“They’re basically like twins because they love playing together,” Dorota says. “They speak Polish; we are exposing them to the language. Since my parents don’t speak any English, I want to make sure my children can communicate. We’ve been Skyping and they cook pierogi, and we watch a lot of Polish news together.”

For Dorota, living in Madison is a dream come true.

“I specifically wanted to live in Madison in terms of schools,” she says. “We had a great opportunity to find a beautiful house that was built 200 years ago on Boston Post Road. When we sold our house in Branford, we sold it in two days, and we had lined up, like 25, houses to go see. This was the first house we saw, and nothing after that compared. It’s a very old house with white pine floors. It has this antique look, and it faces the water and the golf course. We can walk to the library, we can walk to the Green, and that’s important for me. Having grown up in the city, I can walk places. The house needs some work, and we’ve been working on it, too, as a hobby.”

Not that Dorota has a lot of time for hobbies.

“I service a lot of schools and a lot of classes. I recently counted that I’ve been seeing, each week, around 475 children. I’m working on the names,” she says with a laugh. “I like that I can visit different centers and see various environments that children are in. Teaching them in Madison and Guilford but also New Haven shows me different cultures, diversity, and various families from all over the world; that’s what I like.”

She may be from halfway around the world, but Dorota has carved out her own niche here in southern Connecticut.

“I like what I do because working with children is really, really rewarding. It’s my passion,” she says.

To learn more about Neighborhood Music School and Dorota’s classes and programs, visitwww.neighborhoodmusicschool.org and click on “Programs” in the drop-down menu or email Dorota at dxeller@neighborhoodmusicschool.org.