NJPAC Arts Education Programs: Cultivating Creativity and Community Engagement

The New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), the anchor cultural institution for the city of Newark and the state of New Jersey, is not only a venue for world-class performances but also a vibrant hub for arts education and community engagement. NJPAC enhances and transforms lives every day by nurturing students through its comprehensive arts education programs and engaging the community with free events and festivals. As one of the largest arts education providers in America, NJPAC prioritizes inclusion and brings the life-enhancing power of the arts to children, students, educators, artists, and the public.

Summer Creative Arts Camp: A Fun and Expressive Journey

NJPAC’s Summer Creative Arts Camp offers a dynamic and engaging experience for young people to make friends, try new things, and have a ton of fun. Each day, campers explore different avenues of self-expression through hip hop, acting, improvisation, singing, and dancing. Encouraging Teaching Artists guide participants in discovering their creative talents through games and activities. The camp prioritizes safety, implementing measures such as faculty and staff vaccination and HVAC systems meeting industry standards for virus ionization and filtration, alongside cleaning processes that follow all CDC recommendations. Masks are welcomed but not required.

In The Mix: Art as Activism

In The Mix is a student-driven, collaborative, and multidisciplinary program with a civic engagement focus. Conceived as a safe space for students to discuss and produce art as activism, the program fosters social and emotional skills. This initiative emerged from parents seeking more opportunities for their children to collaborate across multiple NJPAC arts education genres. Students meet weekly to discuss, conceive, and develop innovative projects centered around social justice topics that resonate with them. They also attend workshops and interview professional artists who use their creative platforms to address social issues. The program culminates in students showcasing their projects on a podcast they create, produce, and host themselves.

Arts in Health: Promoting Well-being through Creativity

In collaboration with Rutgers University and with support from the Pabst Steinmetz Foundation, NJPAC has developed affordable, accessible online education courses to build capacity for intentional application of arts and culture to improve individual and collective health. This education resource is intended to help arts, health, and allied practitioners provide arts programming for health promotion and well-being.

ACCESS: Arts, Culture, and Community Engagement in Support of Well-Being

The three-hour self-paced introductory course offers a grounding in the field of Arts in Health, where creativity meets well-being. Learners will explore the history, policy connections and contemporary practices that link arts and culture with healthier people and communities. Along the way, participants will reflect on the tensions and opportunities within the field while engaging in their own creative practice.

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Arts in Public Health

Arts in Public Health introduces learners to the ways creative engagement can strengthen community health and advance equity. Through six self-paced modules that take approximately a total of 15 hours to complete, learners explore research, case studies and practical strategies for designing impactful programs. The course blends evidence-based insights with applied activities in designing meaningful ways to connect the arts with public health.

Arts in Health Program Design and Evaluation

This self-paced, approximately 15-hour course helps artists and program leaders design, evaluate and strengthen Arts in Health initiatives using research and lived experience. The five modules contain case studies, reflective prompts and practical tools for evidence-based program building. Participants will learn how to make their work more impactful and sustainable by balancing creativity with rigor.

Trauma-Informed Storytelling

This course explores how storytelling can transform experiences of trauma into pathways for healing, resilience and collective change. Through 15 hours of self-paced course content, participants will study the evolution of trauma and healing practices, and learn expressive arts strategies that foster empowerment and ethical representation. Activities and reflections invite learners to consider their own role in supporting healing through storytelling.

Cooperman Family Arts Education and Community Center: A New Hub for Learning and Creation

Situated on NJPAC’s campus in Downtown Newark, the Cooperman Family Arts Education and Community Center serves as a new center of learning, exploration, and creation. The approximately 58,000 square foot, three-story building invites the community into an indoor “street” that constitutes its heart. Flanking both sides of the interior street are the performing arts education and professional rehearsal spaces. Horizontal openings along the exterior and interior facades showcase the activity within, while double-height windows frame views north toward the main NJPAC building and forthcoming residential and retail spaces and south down Mulberry Street. This state-of-the-art cultural facility fosters a sense of community and belonging and engages students, families, and educators with the performing arts.

Teaching Artist Certificate: Cultivating Justice-Oriented Arts Educators

The Teaching Artist Certificate is a four-week, hybrid summer program that offers holistic training in justice-oriented arts education pedagogy and business practices. The curriculum emphasizes culturally responsive and inclusive teaching practices as well as the significance of arts engagement in fostering social and emotional growth. Through a combination of theory, coursework, fieldwork, networking opportunities, and reflective evaluation, candidates gain personal and professional development that prepares them for the many pathways of teaching artistry.

The Teaching Artist Certificate program is a partnership between Rutgers University-Newark (RU-N) and New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC). The curriculum is facilitated by faculty from RU-N’s Urban Education department, NJPAC teaching artists, and nationally-recognized experts in the field including author and teaching artist Eric Booth.

Defining the Teaching Artist

Teaching artists are defined as practicing professional artists with the complementary skills, curiosities, and sensibilities of an educator, who can effectively engage a wide range of people in learning experiences in, through, and about the arts. They are practicing professional artists who have dual careers as educators. The primary goal of a teaching artist is to positively enhance one’s experience with a work of art through some kind of interactive, hands-on, creative, experiential, multi-modal process, thus effectively creating an environment in which one can more deeply engage with the work of art at hand. Teaching artists do not serve to replace school certified arts educators but serve as valuable resources and partners to teachers.

Program Details

The program fee for accepted applicants is $1,500. A down payment is due upon registering for the program. The remaining balance can be paid in a customizable payment plan. Candidates will apply what they’ve learned in Weeks 1-2 of the program in a full-week of fieldwork.

Application Materials

Application materials include a resume, personal statement, and creative work sample. The personal statement includes a 3-minute video response to questions about the applicant's creative practice, desire to become a teaching artist, qualities of an effective educator, and approaches to teaching. The creative work sample should best represent the applicant's artistic practice, with context provided through a 3-minute video response.

The Colton Institute for Training and Research in the Arts

NJPAC’s Arts Education program has amplified student voices for decades. NJPAC is taking it to the next level with its exciting new initiative, The Colton Institute for Training and Research in the Arts. The Colton Institute develops creative kids, teens, and young adults through Saturday classes, summer camps, coaching, career mentorship, and professional performance opportunities. The Colton Institute also develops creative arts educators with leading-edge training for school districts, teachers, and NJPAC faculty.

Community Impact

NJPAC is one of New Jersey’s largest providers of arts education programs, annually reaching almost 100,000 students (from pre-K to grade 12), teachers, and families. Thousands of New Jersey kids who experience world-class performances on Arts Center stages go on to classes where they can study jazz, acting, musical theater, hip hop arts and culture, and more - either in the Center for Arts Education or in classes taught by NJPAC teaching artists at schools across the state. NJPAC’s professional development opportunities for teachers - classes, workshops, and a podcast through which classroom teachers strengthen or learn new skills - have elevated arts education offerings at Greater Newark schools and surrounding areas.

NJPAC believes that access to the arts is vital to a vibrant civic life. As a nonprofit arts organization, NJPAC enhances and transforms lives every day, delighting audiences with world-class performances, nurturing students through its education programs, and engaging the community with free events and festivals across the city.

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