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Find Connection With AEP’s Partnership Directory

Date: 22 October 2024

Thanks to our partners’ and affiliates’ ongoing commitment to providing all learners with an excellent arts education, we’ve grown significantly, involving hundreds of organizations and individuals! Through transformative environments, knowledge sharing and leadership development, our total number of partners and affiliates has expanded over the past few years. In response, the Arts Education Partnership (AEP) has been working to update our website, including our databases, resources and user experience functions to better support our diverse network. One of these updates is the Partnership Directory.

As you may have noticed on our About page, we’re a dedicated team of seven. The directory was created to foster knowledge sharing within our network, reducing the need to rely solely on our small but mighty team. Once we hit the 100 partner and affiliate mark back in 2021, we began reaching out for feedback from our advisory council and through surveying our network. It became clear that our community wanted a space to collaborate and connect around focus areas within the arts education ecosystem.

This directory allows partners and affiliates to create individual profiles, listing contact information, areas of expertise and current top priorities for collaboration or guidance. These profiles also provide an overview of where and how they are contributing to arts education.

With this latest update, we’ve introduced filters to improve user experience when navigating the directory. These filters allow users to search by:

  • Geographic areas
  • State
  • Primarily served
  • Organization type
  • Artistic disciplines

As we continue to build and strengthen relationships, we encourage the network to use this tool to stay informed about each other’s work and explore opportunities for collaboration.

We urge current partners and affiliates to keep your organization’s profile up to date. If you need to update information in your profile or want to create a profile to include in the directory, please contact Mitra Chamanbahar, AEP’s project manager. If you’re not yet a partner or affiliate, you can learn more about joining on our Partner With AEP page or by contacting me, Krystal Johnson, AEP’s engagement strategist.

Whether you’re seeking mentorship, looking to join forces on a project, or simply wanting to expand your circle, the Partnership Directory is your gateway to our incredible arts education community. Don’t miss out on the chance to elevate your professional journey—explore the directory today to connect, collaborate and create!

Title: 2280 Pasos Bajo un Cielo Nublado | Artist: Hernán Jourdan | Medium: Film

When I was asked to create a work of art exploring literacy, I wanted to create a dance but I had no dancers or a studio, so I chose to use my own body in the space I had, my yard. Fluent Nature is video of micro-choreography that explores what cannot be expressed with words, how nature has its own language, and how placing the human body in nature changes the story.

Title: What Is Me and What Is Not Me | Artist: Alex Chadwell | Medium: Music

My thinking on arts and literacy centers around the concept of literacies and artmaking as both sense-making and meaning-making processes that organically and inevitably overlap, intersect, and reciprocate. Compositionally, What is me and what is not me is a sound collage of sorts (there is no notation for the piece, and I'd be hard pressed to recreate it accurately) that abstractly and aurally represents the relationships between literacies and artmaking.

Title: A Curious Honeybee | Artist: Gideon Young | Medium: Film

Offering welcome through traditional and digital elements of literacy, A Curious Honeybee provides an experiential learning environment by activating visual, musical, natural, and emotional literacies.

Title: Tercera Llamada | Artist: Karilú Forshee | Medium: Audio

La Carpa Theatre is a project that I am currently directing in the Detroit Latinx community. The project aims to strengthen and uplift youth voices through devised theatre, in the style of the Mexican Carpas. This audio was created in the theatrical environment envisioned for our project. The ways in which literacies are re-defined are at the heart of La Carpa Theatre's mission.

Title: Literaseas | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite and ink on paper with digital edits

Title: A Riddle | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite on paper with digital edits

Title: False Binaries | Artist: MJ Robinson | Medium: Graphite on paper with digital edits