This region includes Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Teaching artists are practicing professional artists who use their craft to educate in schools, learning centres or in the community. APTAN provides database of teaching artists around the region, including ways to contact teaching artists in your area. It is free to list yourself as a teaching artist on this database.
We also conduct networking and professional learning events from time to time. APTAN aims to create a network of teaching artists in the Australia-Pacific region, and bringing about awareness of the critical and transformative nature of teaching artists’ work.
This site is hosted by our parent organisation, ITAC (the International Teaching Artist Collaborative) which is an international network of artists working in community and educational settings. You can also find information about how artists’ work in education can be life changing, and you can learn more about what teaching artists offer the community.
A teaching artist is a practicing professional artists who uses their craft to educate in schools, learning centres or in the community. The Lincoln Centre adds that teaching-artists expand their artistry to include the skills, curiosities, and habits of action of an educator in order to achieve a wide variety of learning goals in, through, and about the arts, with a wide
range of learners. Teaching artists are professional or active artists who have a craft which might be drama and theatre, dance, poetry, visual arts, music, media or digital artforms, creative writing and much more.
The artist works to educate in community, school or learning settings, blending their artistry with pedagogy to create unique and wondrous outcomes for participants.
Teaching artists inspire and guide learners to make personally relevant connections in, through, and about the arts.
If you are an artist working in an educational or community setting, you may be a teaching artist and we invite you to list yourself on our teaching artist database. We invite you to become active in APTAN by coming along to our events, or you can event suggest and organise your own. We look forward to broadening the network of teaching artists in the Australia-Pacific region, and bringing about awareness of the critical and transformative nature of teaching artists’ work.
“A teaching artist is a practicing professional artist who develops the complementary skills, curiosities and habits of mind of an educator, in order to achieve a wide variety of learning goals in, through, and about the arts, with a wide variety of learners.”
Eric Booth
If you would like to read more about the role of teaching-artists, pls go to our RESEARCH page.