Programs
Teaching Artist Training Program
Teaching artistry is a profession. BCT trains it like one.
Photo: NYC Connect 2025 video, Brooklyn Children’s Theatre
Paid to learn, then paid to lead
The Teaching Artist Training Program (TATP) gives young adults from predominantly Black, Brown, and low-income Brooklyn communities 18 months of paid, on-the-job training to become professional teaching artists in musical theatre. Trainees are primarily BCT alumni: scholarship students who grew up in our programs and now return as educators, paid a living wage, to train the next generation of Brooklyn artists.
10 of 12
members of the first TATP cohort now hold teaching artist positions at BCT and other NYC organizations.
4
TATP graduates are now full-time arts teachers in New York City and New Jersey schools.
56%
of BCT’s teaching artist team are TATP graduates.
85%
of BCT’s teaching artist team are Black, Brown, and/or Global Majority.
See TATP in action
NYC Connect 2025: Brooklyn Children’s Theatre’s Teaching Artist Training Program. Video from Brooklyn Children’s Theatre on YouTube.
The problem we’re solving
The teaching artist field has a diversity crisis driven by economics. Traditional pathways into arts education require unpaid internships, conservatory tuition, and years of low-wage work. For Black, Brown, and low-income artists, those pathways are closed by design.
BCT exists at the intersection of that inequity. In FY26, 83% of our 719 students were Black, Brown, and Global Majority, and 80% received tuition assistance. Our alumni grow into extraordinary artists. Without TATP, most would have no accessible route into the profession that shaped them.
The pipeline
TATP is the culminating step in a Brooklyn-grown pathway BCT has built over two decades. Each stage builds toward a sustainable career, and interns and trainees are paid for their work.
Step 1: Scholarship student
Grades 1 to 12 at BCT
Step 2: Paid intern
$18 an hour, high school and college students
Step 3: TATP trainee
18 months, $30 to $40 an hour
Step 4: Lead teaching artist
At BCT or beyond
Step 5: Full-time arts educator
In NYC and New Jersey schools
This is wage repair for a profession that has historically underpaid and excluded Global Majority artists from sustained, living-wage careers in arts education.
How it works
Trainees move through three levels under BCT’s senior teaching artists, one BCT season each, with one hour of mentorship every week. All of it happens in live classes with students in grades 1 to 12.
Level One
“I do”
The trainee shadows a senior teaching artist in a live class.
Level Two
“We do”
Trainee and mentor co-teach side by side.
Level Three
“You do”
The trainee leads the class while the mentor observes. The result: a teaching artist ready to lead solo.
Pay
$30 an hour for meetings, mentorship, and supervised instruction, and $40 an hour for teaching BCT classes on their own. Each year a trainee returns, the rate rises $5 an hour, up to BCT’s $60 senior teaching artist rate.
What trainees learn
Trauma-informed instruction, Universal Design for Learning, NeuroCapable-informed neurodiversity practices, and anti-hierarchical musical theatre.
Who trains
Primarily BCT alumni from historically excluded communities; 91% are Black, Brown, and/or Latiné.
This year
Three trainees are in the program in 2026-27, one at each level. Four professional development sessions led by senior teaching artists will give every trainee the same foundation. BCT targets 4 to 6 trainees per cohort, with a new cohort every 18 months.
Why it matters
In BCT’s classrooms
TATP graduates make up 56% of BCT’s teaching artist team, and the full team is 85% Black, Brown, and/or Global Majority. When children from predominantly Black and Brown communities see their teachers reflect their own backgrounds, the classroom dynamic shifts. Students feel seen. They take risks. They stay. BCT’s 70% annual student return rate is, in part, a TATP outcome.
Across Brooklyn and the field
TATP trainees come from Brooklyn schools and return to teach in Brooklyn classrooms. Ten graduates have gone on to teaching positions across New York City and beyond, and four hold full-time classroom roles in NYC and New Jersey schools. BCT intends for TATP to be a rolling cycle: an ongoing source of trained, community-rooted teaching artists for its own programs and for the field, with the Paid Internship Program as a direct feeder.
“As our first cohort of TATs has grown and graduated into the workforce, BCT sees a need for a new cohort of trainees. This allows us to resupply our own teaching force trained in our unique, whole-child-focused pedagogy, and also to be a source for the teaching artist industry at large.”
Support the next cohort of teaching artists
Download the two-page program summary to share with your team, or talk with Amy White-Graves, BCT’s Founder and Executive Director, at amy@brooklynchildrenstheatre.org or (646) 675-0325.
