Kasey Viani started on her path as a performer when her mom signed her up for dance and gymnastics lesson when she was 2. A few years later, she added singing and musical theater, leading to a life and career in the performing arts.

“I found my true self!” she says. “It was like I had literally found how and why my heart beats, which is what I hope to help do for my students today.”

Before focusing on her students, Viani started dancing for The Walt Disney Company in their shows, parades, and national commercials when she was 19 (including as the Snow White queen in “Fantasmic!” in 1997). She learned and performed multiple parts and trained new dancers joining the show. After five years with Disney, she left to pursue her own music career, while working on video and television projects on the side that included dancing on “Soul Train,” performing in Las Vegas, and working with and meeting celebrities like Michael Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, and Bruce Willis. When she met her husband, though, her perspective shifted. She couldn’t get married and have the family she wanted and continue traveling the way that an entertainment career would require, so she went back to school. As she studied, she realized that teaching runs in the family, from her mom to her grandmother and her aunt, so she earned a master’s in education and got her teaching credentials.

Today, she’s a performing arts teacher, working in schools for 12 years while also running her Viani’s Performing Arts Academy with individual and small group instruction in the performing arts. Last month, she was recognized for her work at Los Coches Creek Middle School in El Cajon with a 2023 Arts Empower Ovation Award for creative leader from the San Diego County Office of Education. She and a dozen other winners were recognized for their work to provide arts education to kids throughout San Diego County.

Viani, 47, lives in El Cajon with her husband, Bryan, and their daughter, Juliet. She took some time to talk about her work and organizing the production of Disney’s “Frozen JR” with more than 200 kids that got her nominated for recognition.

Q: Congratulations on your award. What does it mean to you to be recognized for your work in this way?

A: It means a lot. It’s hard for me to put words to a recognition such as this in that I only did what any other performing arts teacher would have done — everything in my power to build something truly special for the kids. These kids deserve a quality performing arts program, and I was simply doing what I needed to do to create that for them. All of my experience isn’t worth anything unless I am paying it forward and sharing it in some way, so to be recognized for doing something that is second nature for me is quite overwhelming and humbling.

Q: Tell us about the work you’ve been doing at Los Coches Creek, in the Cajon Valley Union School District.

A: My job requires me to wear all kinds of different hats in building a quality performing arts program. I teach musical theater, dance, choir, technical theater/stagecraft, and video production. I currently have 60 students, which is a good start for a new program.

As part of a new performing arts program, I knew there was more I needed to do than to just teach the subjects all day long. When I first moved into my classroom space, I learned it had been abandoned and was being used for storage (so there were lots of spiders everywhere). We also had next to no costume/prop/set inventory or the necessary supplies to support the needs of the technical stage. I asked local theater houses, including The Old Globe, for any old or used costumes they were going to get rid of and, to my delight, some of them got back to me. Between The Old Globe and the San Diego Junior Theatre, they donated about $15,000 in costumes.

Seeing that our program could use funding, I reached out to the Friends of East County Arts and applied for 10 different grants and we were selected for three, totaling $2,400 to help our development process. I’m also working closely with the school district to rectify our significant technical problems, but I’ve actually resorted to bringing my personal sound system from home so that the kids could have a quality show with no sound issues.

What I love about El Cajon…

I like to say that our home is my refuge, my safe space. Our neighborhood is up on a hill and removed from a lot of the hustle and bustle of San Diego, so I love how quiet it is at our home. I also like how our neighbors aren’t too far away so we can easily visit and get together for dinners, if time allows.

Q: You organized a production of “Frozen JR” at The Magnolia in El Cajon in March?

A: When it was first designed, the show started with a cast of 28 students. When I was notified that we were going to be able to stage it at The Magnolia, I chose to cast my dance class and my choir class to help increase cast numbers and help fill the 1,500 seats at the venue. Recognizing that we still needed to fill more seats, we came up with having me travel to our feeder elementary school sites, Rios Elementary and Blossom Valley Elementary, to teach various song and dance numbers from the show. I found myself driving back and forth between schools every day in the ambition to build the show to meet the scale capacity of theater, but also to build our performing arts program in our school district. This effort turned our then-60 person cast to a 260-person cast. That’s a lot of kids! The effort paid off because The Magnolia was filled to capacity and the kids received a standing ovation at the end of the show.

Q: What did you notice about what the students were learning and gaining from this experience?

A: Self-confidence and perseverance. The performing arts not only teaches theater, dance, and singing, but also professionalism, timeliness, spatial awareness, and reading fluency. To be on stage in any role, a student must be able to read fluently and theater helps develop that skill without all of the stress associated with it. Students also learned the importance of community. A worthwhile production only happens when the cast works as a unit, and that’s what happened here. Many times, I saw my lead actors helping out ensemble members with quick changes so that they could help get their friends back on stage in a timely fashion. The unity and bonding these students experienced with this show will last their entire lives. They may not stay close friends as they grow up, but they will have this positive experience to draw on and remember forever. I also highly commend the perseverance I saw my students demonstrate. Picking up our rehearsal props and costumes from the school and transporting them to the theater space isn’t an easy thing to do, and they couldn’t have been more vigilant. They came together to help each other navigate our new performance space, placing costumes and props in the necessary locations for themselves and their friends. I am so proud of all of them. They have all grown substantially and are completely different people from how they started out this school year, not knowing what the theater program was all about.

Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

A: To always keep perspective. I have lost a lot of close friends recently in my life and when I have a bad rehearsal, or even just an overall bad day, I think to myself, ‘Was it really that bad? I have a healthy mind and body, a faith that never fails me, a home to live in, and a healthy family who loves me no matter how difficult I can be.’ Perspective.

Q: What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you?

A: The notorious Billy the Kid is in my bloodline.

Q: Please describe your ideal San Diego weekend.

A: Barbecuing with my family in our backyard during sunset, going to church, and maybe escaping to SeaWorld to go on a few rides with my daughter because she thinks it’s funny when I get nauseous.