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Center for Creative Youth Coordinator Participates in Q & A as Program Celebrates 40th Year

(Hartford, CT) For 40 years, the Center for Creative Youth has provided promising young artists with an opportunity to polish their skills at a four-week interdisciplinary arts residency program run by CREC on the Wesleyan University campus.

It’s a competitive program that selects fewer than 150 students from around the world each year to participate. Students live in Wesleyan’s dorms and take classes in their areas of interest, such as filmmaking, dance, and musical theater. Students also participate in interdisciplinary courses that introduce them to different art skills, go on field trips, attend guest lectures, and enjoy performances by professional artists.

The Center for Creative Youth program is meaningful, instructive, and a chance for students to find and develop their talents.

This summer’s residency program recently ended, and Center for Creative Youth Program Coordinator Lisa Foss took time to reflect on the program and its impact on high school students.

Q. Who participated in the Center for Creative Youth this year?

A. This year, the Center for Creative Youth had 119 students, including students from Connecticut, other U.S. states, and international students from China, France, South Korea, and St. Maarten.

Q. What makes the Center for Creative Youth a unique program?

A. The Center for Creative Youth is a month-long residential program open to all high school students interested in exploring the arts at the collegiate level on a prestigious college campus, regardless of their financial means. In fact, 74 percent of the program’s participants receive financial scholarships.

Our student population is also unique. This year, 6 percent of our students traveled to Connecticut from others countries and 20 percent were out-of-state students. The remainder of the students represented 47 different Connecticut cities and towns. Fifty-eight percent of the total student population identified themselves as non-white students.

The intimacy of students living, eating, working, playing, and learning together creates an affirmational environment where it is possible to take healthy, creative risks and receive constructive feedback. The residential experience, woven with rigorous arts curricula and exposure to professional-level arts performances, launches our students forward into a world where they feel empowered to take their own art seriously and approach the arts as something essential, rather than something extra-curricular.Participants are trained to complete an arts advocacy project in their home communities, ensuring that the artistic experience is a long-lasting one and does not end when students leave Wesleyan.

Q. Who are the program’s instructors?

A. Center for Creative Youth staff is comprised of college professors, professional artists, and guest artists from across the nation. They’ve been on Broadway, displayed their work in renowned galleries, played music all over the world, and published work in local and national magazines.

Our residential staff is comprised of artists in college or in their 20s who are advancing their own arts education at institutions throughout the country. Many of them return to the Center for Creative Youth every year to work with students, and 95 percent of them are program alumni.

Q. What did you do this summer to mark the Center for Creative Youth’s 40th anniversary?

We invited all alumni to our open class share day via our social media pages. We also encouraged alumni to share their pictures and Center for Creative Youth memorabilia. We will be working to generate an alumni newsletter and anticipate holding reunion and networking events.

Q. Describe a noteworthy moment in Center for Creative Youth history? How has the program changed and evolved?

A. Grammy Award-winning jazz artist Jimmy Greene, a CREC Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts High School alum, performed for students this summer. The CREC Ana Grace Academy of the Arts Elementary School is named in honor of his daughter, Newtown victim Ana Grace Marquez-Greene.

Over the years, the Center for Creative Youth’s curriculum has been updated to meet the demands for college acceptance. In 2013, the program moved from being a five-week program to a four-week program.

The Center for Creative Youth continues to refine best practices by preserving what is most valued about the program and tweaking the areas where updates and improvements can benefit the experience. This is accomplished through extensive post-program reviews, which include student evaluations, parent surveys, teacher reviews, residential interviews, and department chair debriefings.

This year, the Center for Creative Youth is able to share its 40th anniversary celebration with CREC, the Hartford-based agency that runs the program. CREC is celebrating an agency-wide anniversary—its 50th.

Q. Does the Center for Creative Youth have any notable alumni?

A. Anika Noni Rose is a Tony Award-winning actress who has appeared in “Caroline, or Change” and “Dream Girls. She also is the voice of Tiana in Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog.”

Avery Wilson was a finalist on season 3 of “The Voice,” and Matt Jackson holds the fourth longest winning streak on “Jeopardy.” Kathryn Morris starred in “Cold Case,”a television drama.

For more information about the Center for Creative Youth, visit www.crec.org/ccy. You can also learn more about the program and connect with alumni by visiting the program on Facebook at fb.com/crecccy and by following @CRECCCY on Twitter.