Teaching Artist

“A teaching artist (artist-educator) is a practicing professional artist with the complementary skills and sensibilities of an educator, who engages people in learning experiences in, through or about the arts.” - Nationally-recognized actor, teaching artist and author Eric Booth

Artists are exemplary problem-solvers and life-long learners, constantly striving to improve, deepen and refine their artistic expression. They work specifically with the skills of creativity: discovery, wonder, and recombining the stuff of the world into new knowledge. If human beings have managed to survive through the development of skills that allow us to collaborate: language pictures, gestures, movement, “it follows that the art originate deep in our intelligence,” in our ability to survive by means of creating and understanding metaphor. Education in the arts is an irreplaceable medium for developing this intelligence. Successful teaching artists help provide a tangible link between the creative process and all kinds of learning, and they make manifest in classroom and community settings the human drive to survive by making meaning our of the world.

For many years, professional artists have practiced their art and made significant contributions to the field of arts education. Working individually and within arts education programs, they have used their creative processes to bring learners into arts experiences. Teaching artists are a crucial resource for the future of arts education, the arts in general, and the overall process of learning. The role of the teaching artist is an integral part of the overarching arts education constellation, which includes:

  • short and long-term school and after-school residencies
  • arts experiences, including in-school performances by professional artists, as well as field trips to studios, galleries, museums, and performances.
  • integrating the arts throughout the curriculum as a way of engaging all types of intelligence’s in the learning process
  • arts education standards backed up by ongoing curriculum-based arts instruction in K-12 grades.
  • discipline-specific learning in the arts: visual art, dance, theater, music, poetry
  • higher education and on-going development for the professional artist, as well as the professional artist who is also a teaching artist
  • lifelong learning in the arts through community arts events, classes and workshops