students take center stage

FirstWorks Arts Education aims to help students succeed in school, life, and work. We combine the power of the arts with experiential learning serving both students, their families, and educators. Reaching diverse neighborhoods and low-income families, most of our students are from under-resourced districts. Our education program provides them with access to performing arts experiences from around the world.

Connecting Art with Audiences

FirstWorks Arts Education aims to help students succeed in school, life, and work. We combine the power of the arts with experiential learning serving both students, their families, and educators. Reaching diverse neighborhoods and low-income families, the majority of our students are from under-resourced districts. For many, our education program is their first performing arts experience.

 

Our program strives to address Rhode Island’s education crisis and create systemic change in classrooms through the arts and arts-based learning. Building deep, ongoing relationships with over 40 public and charter schools across Rhode Island, we help fill the gap left from severe public spending cuts.

Technology is integral to our expanding program. Launched in 2009, we have grown to serve over 5,000 in-person students and more than three times that virtually.  We are committed to re-engaging thousands of students set back by COVID, motivating teachers, and supporting hybrid learning with educational supports that school budgets may lack. Even beyond COVID, we will continue to build our technological resources to strengthen the program and expand our impact on the community.

  • Virtual Learning
  • In-school learning
  • Performances for Youth
  • Artist Talks/Community Programs
  • Professional Development
  • Core school partnerships

Technology is integral to our expanding program. Launched in 2009, we have grown to serve over 5,000 in-person students and more than three times that virtually.  We are committed to re-engaging thousands of students set back by COVID, motivating teachers, and supporting hybrid learning with educational supports that school budgets may lack. Even beyond Covid, we will continue to build our technological resources to strengthen the program and expand our impact on the community.

  • Virtual Learning
  • In-school learning
  • Performances for Youth
  • Artist Talks/Community Programs
  • Professional Development
  • Core school partnerships

Contact our Education Department:

Jamil Jorge

Education Director

(401) 421-4278 ext. 207

jjorge@firstworks.org

Sam Zimmer

Education Program Coordinator

szimmer@firstworks.org

Virtual Learning Series

Welcome Educators, Students, and Parents! Light a fire for learning through the arts that carries students through their academic life and beyond. Discover a rich, continuously expanding collection of virtual performances and lessons featuring world-class musicians, dancers, theatre artists, and thinkers.

This is America: An Anthology

This is America: An Anthology

Music From the Sole

Music From the Sole

Unleashing Your Creative Potential: Step Into the Fear

Unleashing Your Creative Potential: Step Into the Fear

Women Trailblazers in Music: The Deserted Garden

Women Trailblazers in Music: The Deserted Garden

Meet our 2022-23 Artist Educators

A young Asian man dancing shirtless outside in front of a yellow sided house with a pink outdoor light

Steven “Sen” Choummalaithong

About Steven

Steven “Sen” Choummalaithong (zem/ze//xem/xe) born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island as a first generation American citizen in his family originally migrated from Laos (Southeast Asia) after the secret war in Laos, a story which is interpreted and told in The Historical Fantasy of Esek Hopkins, an original activist dance opera created by The Haus of Glitter Dance Company. As one of five co-directors of The Haus of Glitter, their most recent projects offer a lens around BIPOC ancestral + historical preservation, and self-care + rest practices specializing with dance, movement practices, performance + theater, and yoga + mindfulness. Steven graduated and was certified for yogic studies and practices with the Bhavana Yoga School and continued to become a registered yoga teacher with Yoga Alliance Foundation. Steven also received mentorship in dance education and performance ethics with New Works/World Traditions dance company, founded by Michelle B Coulibaly, in the Department of Theater Arts & Performance at Brown University and received training from international artists in yogic practices and several movement styles such as West African dance, Hip-hop, Contemporary, Butoh, Contact Improv, Latin Dance, House, Vogue. Steven has been sharing their practices with the providence community and youths of all ages for many years creating collaborations, offering yoga + mindfulness workshops, teaching dance and choreography, producing and directing original and local performances, shows, and many more. Steven hopes xe influences others to take care of the self, and understand that learning about art and culture are acts of resistance, empowerment, and ancestral preservation.

Instagram @stevethepeople

Aisha Jandosova

Aisha Jandosova

About Aisha

Aisha Jandosova is Qazaq-Kyrgyz diasporic designer, learner and educator, currently based in Providence, USA. Aisha co-founded BABALAR PRESS, an experimental research, writing and publishing initiative for relearning, reclaiming and reimagining Qazaq ancestral knowledges. Her long-term re-existencia research involves remaking and learning from the cultural practices of her ancestors, to imagine more loving futures, grounded in pre-colonial Central Asian nomadic worldviews.

Instagram @towardsanidealplace / @babalarpress

A young white man wearing a blue hoodie and an elaborate cardboard costume of a horseshoe crab stands facing away from the sea with his arms in a crab stance

Eli Nixon

About Eli

Eli Nixon builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist, or exist but call for creative intervention. They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of plays, puppets, pageants, parades, suitcase theaters & low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with artists, activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for collective liberation. They are an enthusiast and practitioner of naturedrag, amateur flag dancing, and DIY festoonery. Eli is proposing a new holiday in homage to horseshoe crabs. Their illustrated manual for celebrating the holiday, BLOODTIDE, is available through The 3rd Thing Press and at local libraries and bookstores. Relatedly, everyone is invited to bask in 450 million years of flora and fauna, built from recyclables, by Eli and over 200 modern humans, currently installed in the stairwell of the Providence Public Library downtown. Eli is a Rhode Islander living on Narragansett land.

Visit Website.

A heavyset Cambodian man wearing a black brimmed hat, white t-shirt and silver necklace stands with his arms lightly crossed against a dark background lit with blue and red theatrical lights

Savonnara Alex Sok

About Savonnara

Savonnara Alex Sok is a Cambodian/ American visual artist based in Providence, Rhode Island who engages with the community through live painting events, murals, and working with youth. Savonnara started creating art at the age of 14 and received a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design and Illustration. Although art was never a direct career path for Savonnara, it was an ever present passion in his life as a personal passion and in the form of therapy and freelance commission work. As his life progressed Savonnara was able to merge passion with his professional life and he began working as a Teaching Artist at AS220 Youth in the spring of 2021, during virtual programming due to the pandemic. He was then promoted in Spring of 2022 and is now AS220 Youth’s Visuals & Media Arts Coordinator. His inspiration is influenced from his Cambodian heritage, growing up in America as a child of refugee parents fleeing from the Khmer Rouge genocide. Other influences include being bipoc centered, love, death, community, social and racial injustices and human nature are ever present in his work.

Instagram @savonnara401

A middle-aged Asian man with salt and pepper hair and light goatee smiles in three-quarter profile. He wears a blue and red checked shirt, a white floral tie and glasses

Jeffrey Yoo Warren

About Jeffrey

Jeffrey Yoo Warren (he/him) is a Korean-american artist-educator, community scientist, illustrator, and researcher in Providence, RI, who collaboratively creates community science projects which decenter dominant culture in environmental knowledge production. His recent work combines ancestral craft practices and creative work with diasporic memory through virtual collaborative worldbuilding. Jeff is a member of AS220, an educator with Movement Education Outdoors, and part of the New Old art collective with Aisha Jandosova, hosting art-making and storytelling events with older adults. His current artistic practice investigates how people build identity and strength through their interactions with artifacts and histories, and the ways that objects can tell stories that people can be part of in the present.

Visit Website

We are preparing to place resident artist educators in Rhode Island schools for the 2023-2024 school year. Contact us for details