“I really love to extend art and creativity for everyone. Art for all. Art for everybody.”
Simone Liberty is a full-time Teaching Artist based in Charleston. As a Teaching Artist, or traveling arts educator, Liberty teaches Arts Integration in schools throughout Charleston, Dorchester, and Berkeley counties. Arts Integration uses visual and performing art forms including dance, art, and theatre, connecting them to core curriculum subjects such as math, science, and ELA.
About
Simone Liberty has been in Charleston since 2015, when she left her hometown in Connecticut to attend the College of Charleston to pursue an Arts Management degree. She remained at the College of Charleston to earn a Master of Public Administration with a certificate in Arts and Cultural Management.
While in graduate school, Liberty observed a summer theater program for children at the Gailliard Center; she was so inspired to get involved that she wrote a letter to the program director, essentially creating a part-time position for herself in fundraising and education. Her proposal was successful, and over the next year, she worked as a fundraiser to support Gailliard’s educational programs. While she enjoyed that position, she realized she wanted to work more directly with children, and becoming a Teaching Artist has fulfilled that desire.
Liberty speaks openly about the difficulties of working as a Teaching Artist, such as the networking required to make it a full-time endeavor and the isolation of being an independent educator. “You have to be intentional with networking and getting yourself out in the community so people know who you are and what you do. It requires lots of self-initiation.”
At the same time, Liberty is excited about the increasing demand for Teaching Artists and opportunities for entrepreneurship. Liberty loves tap dancing, for example, but the cost of tap shoes makes teaching the dance form in schools cost-prohibitive. Instead of allowing that challenge to get in her way, she took inspiration from her “Art for all” mantra and created a tap accessory that can be added to the front of a child’s own shoe to give them the tap-dancing experience.
Liberty advises aspiring creative students to “Remember your why” in order to “stay connected to what brought you to the arts in the first place.” She notes that many Arts Management professionals are artists and creatives themselves who run the risk of losing touch with their skill and craft if their professional roles require them to drift from their original purpose. She encourages young professionals to “find those opportunities to stick with your craft and make sure that stays in your practice. It helps you to fill in that work-life balance and at the same time might let you draw some connections toward your ‘why,’ why you’re doing this.”
