Check Out Laurel Butler’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Laurel Butler.

Laurel, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’ve worked in arts education for over 25 years… which is crazy because I’m only 21! JK: I’m 21 in my mind, but in reality I’m 41, so if I do the math that means I was 15 when I first started working as a teaching artist (though I didn’t have that language then) at a kids theatre program in my hometown. Since then, I’ve earned a BA and MA in performing arts education as well as a Doctorate in social justice leadership for educational practice. Along the way I’ve taught pretty much every art form – theatre, dance, music, visual art, poetry, even filmmaking which I have no business teaching – in a huge range of contexts: preK-12 schools, colleges and universities, museums, nonprofit organizations, afterschool programs, summer camps, jails and detention centers, professional performing arts companies, you name it.

Lately, the thing I love doing most is professional development: helping artists develop their teaching practice, especially my undergraduate art students at LMU (shoutout to the non tenure track faculty union!) or helping teachers incorporate the arts into their teaching, especially in special ed classrooms through my work as Director of Youth Programming at Everyday Arts. I’m also an artist myself: I’ve made a bunch of performance pieces that have won awards or been curated into festivals, I dance as often as I possibly can, I’ve been the frontwoman for a handful of music projects, and I love making theater with my friends, whether it’s the Royal Frog Ballet performance collective I’ve been a part of since college or my Los Angeles children’s performance comrades in my current project, the Magic Power Family Hour.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The biggest challenge in arts education, I think, is that people outside of the field don’t take it very seriously! I think that this is part and parcel of a general ageism in our culture, where we’re very ready to dismiss childhood as nonessential, just a training ground for adulthood – so much of our education system is structured this way, to prepare children for life in a productive capitalist society. But I find in conversation with my students and friends that childhood is actually the most valuable period in our lives, and there’s a constant desire to return to that state of creativity and wide-eyed wonder – I think that’s a big reason clown performance is so popular in this city right now. So what if we flipped the paradigm, and made childhood the more worthy and important era in life, and our work as adults was just to hold space for honoring childhood and supporting that experience as much as possible? What if we all took that responsibility very seriously?! What if we gave arts education the funding and resourcing it deserves, and brought rigorous training to our work as arts educators? So my biggest challenge has been pushing back against institutions who see arts education as a sort of frivolity, who marginalize or neglect it as a low-priority organizational value… or, maybe even worse, organizations who claim to be all about arts education but whose actual practices lack integrity, quality, thoroughness, and thus exploit both teaching artists and the students they purport to serve. That’s actually why I decided to do dissertation work in this field: to find out what sets apart social justice youth arts programs who are really effective from those who don’t actually do the work in alignment with their professed mission, vision and values. Now that I work mostly as a freelance consultant, I will only take on clients who really walk their talk.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Because access to high-quality arts education is so profoundly important to me, I try to address that need at all levels. At the macro level, I’m about to start working with Create California to develop a clear and accessible roadmap for career pathways in arts education. We have a crazy situation here in California where Prop 28, which was passed in 2022, earmarked millions of dollars to hire credentialed arts teachers, but there’s a huge deficit of credentialed arts teachers throughout the state. Meanwhile, folks in other creative industries are really struggling! So my vision right now is to remove barriers for artists and creative folks to get their teaching credentials, enter the arts education workforce (that so many of our tax dollars are meant to support), and bring their unique magic to classrooms and students all throughout California.

At the more meso level, I teach on faculty at Loyola Marymount University helping undergraduate arts students learn the basics of arts education for social and emotional learning – theories of human creativity development, how to write a lesson plan, classroom management fundamentals, things like that – so that teaching in the arts can be an available career pathway for them after graduating. I also work with Everyday Arts, coaching special education teachers in arts integration strategies, which helps their classrooms become more creative and inclusive while also supporting their neurodivergent students’ experiences with art and play. It’s really beautiful work – after I come home from that job I almost always cry a little because of how profoundly creative every human being is, and how unjust it is that this world is so set up for some people and less for others. Art is a human right! Ugh!

And then my final gesture to make high-quality arts education accessible to everyone is at the micro level: The Magic Power Family Hour, a late-night-style variety show for parents of young children and their children, right down the street at our neighborhood venue, the Elysian Theater. I’ve curated all of my favorite children’s performers throughout LA, basically all of whom are friends old and new, to put together a slam-bang show with music, puppetry, comedy sketches, video, choreographed dances, and deeply meaningful messaging for grownups and kids alike. I get very fatigued of the cliché that children’s entertainment has to be simplistic or pandering – it doesn’t seem fair to me that so often kids shows are boring for adults, but then the avant-garde performances which are so robust and virtuosic in LA don’t often make space for young audiences! This show intends to be developmentally appropriate for little kiddos, culturally relevant for parents, and deeply aesthetically enjoyable (and hilarious) for both.

Clearly I’m not the only LA parent who feels this way – the show sold out in a matter of days! If you’re interested in attending the next one, just enter Magic Power Family Hour in the contact form at laurelbutler.com and we’ll put you on the list.

What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
My astrology LoL! I’m a Capricorn sun, which means I am astrologically predisposed to be an incredibly hard worker: very ambitious, very organized, with a perhaps even outsized sense of self confidence. To the goat sign, every project is a mountain to be summitted and then on to the next mountain. My inflated self-confidence is exacerbated my my Leo rising which makes me pretty unafraid of the spotlight, so I have a relatively high tolerance for visibility in leadership. If I’m telling the truth, this quality dipped a little during the earlier half of this decade as I went through a multi-year gauntlet of pandemic/pregnancy/postpartum/doctoral studies/moving to New York and back multiple times/etc. all of which was a little bit fragmenting to the self. But now that I’ve been firmly back in Los Angeles for a year-and-a-half, my Leo side is thriving amidst all of the sunshine and fabulous outfits and rich ecosystem of arts education colleagues and friends. It also helps that my lil baby guy has grown into an amazing kid, whose name is literally Leo!

And then I’ve got my Aquarius moon, which keeps me oriented around postcapitalist visions of community and human possibility. I will always pick the power of the people over the power of the institution (shoutout AGAIN to the LMU non tenure track faculty union!) so the Aquarian energy helps balance out the other two, reminding me to stay humble, to be in service to the collective, and to stay grounded in my core radical values of social justice and mutual aid. I also have an amazingly supportive, brilliant, generous husband (Taurus), and am pretty hardcore about my self-care practices, including consistent yoga, swimming, zen mindfulness, therapy, journaling, vegetarianism, Instagram blocker apps, Lexapro, LOTS of playing with my kid, and truly epic voice/text/video messages with my amazing community of far-flung friends every day. The geopolitical situation is bleak, man! Taking care of ourselves is no longer a cute afterthought; it is essential to our survival.

That’s why arts education is so important to me: we have to be able to create and hold spaces for people, especially young people, to make their art as a way of processing and metabolizing the truly wild experience of being a human on planet earth.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://laurelbutler.com
• Instagram: @estrellaurel
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dr-laurel-butler-ma-edd-b0940a19/
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@LButler303
• Other: postman.substack.com or https://cfa.lmu.edu/programs/studioarts/faculty/?expert=laurel.butler

Image Credits
Martin Yernazian, Ewen Wright