About Us
The New York City Arts in Education Roundtable improves, advances, and advocates for arts education. Our core purpose is to elevate, enhance, and sustain the work of the arts education community in New York City’s schools and communities.
Strategic Plan
Check out our 2020-2025 Strategic Plan to learn about our data-driven vision for the Roundtable!
The New York City Arts in Education Roundtable is a community of organizations and practitioners that shares information, provides professional development, and communicates with the public to promote our work in schools and beyond.
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The Roundtable was created in 1992 by and for a small group of education directors at Manhattan-based cultural organizations to share best practices in the then-new work of fostering arts experiences and teaching artistry in public school classrooms. Built on a model of collective earned wisdom, these educators formed a new community of practice, laying the groundwork for pervasive arts education advocacy and a shift toward comprehensive field building.
Today, the Roundtable now includes every arts discipline, organizations and practitioners in all five boroughs, and teaching artists as well as administrators. Our membership includes thousands of practitioners from over 125+ organizations, representing New York City’s largest and smallest cultural institutions, community-based organizations, and youth organizations from all 5 boroughs.
The Face to Face conference, instituted in the Roundtable’s first year, has grown to become the largest arts education gathering in the region. As the main convening body for NYC arts education practitioners, the Roundtable is now the go-to hub for information, advocacy, and community among arts education professionals in New York City. As a true grassroots service organization, the Roundtable’s vision and reach continues to evolve along with the arts education field in New York City.
The Roundtable builds its efforts around the value that arts education should be a right for all New York students, especially students with disabilities, students from low-income communities, and Black, Indigenous, and students of color.
Click here to view our full organizational chronology.
Federal Tax ID Number: 13-4024584
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Our Commitment to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
The New York City Arts in Education Roundtable is committed to equity, inclusion, and justice.
We acknowledge our complicity in the long history of systemic racism within our country and the institutions of power in our city. We will continue to work to dismantle white supremacy within our organizations, schools, and communities. Our work here is just beginning, but we know that this has been a fight for centuries. The Roundtable has been using this set of Equity and Inclusion Values as guiding principles for our work. We plan to evaluate and make annual commitments related to these values each year going forward.
- The Roundtable is committed to eliminating barriers and revealing pathways to cultural equity and inclusion in arts education, through our programming and our membership.
- The Roundtable is committed to eliminating barriers to advancement for professionals from underrepresented communities.
- The Roundtable is committed to responsive listening and transparency so that not only are we sharing our “best practices” but our challenges and questions as well.
- The Roundtable is committed to advocating for professional wages, employment benefits and fair working conditions for arts education practitioners’ quality and standard of living
The NYC Arts in Education Roundtable gratefully acknowledges the Altman Foundation for their generous support of this website.
