NYC s 4,500 Teaching Artists Have Been Hit Hard By Pandemic Cuts
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In 2017, Marissa Ontiveros, a newly minted NYU grad with a minor in educational theater, applied to several community-based cultural organizations to be a teaching artist in the city s public schools. Soon she had all the jobs she could handle. “I was working at five organizations in early 2020 teaching theater, movement and different art pieces,” she said about making a living in her field right out of college a stroke of good fortune that would be almost entirely undone by COVID-19. She was part of the fallout from the profound blow to arts education funding that was caused by the pandemic, and from which students and their teachers are still struggling to recover.