Arts
The Arts at LREI
The arts are essential to learning at LREI, not a complement to it. From the Fours through twelfth grade, students engage in a robust and developmentally aligned arts curriculum that includes visual art, music, drama, and dance. These experiences cultivate imagination, courage, and expression — and challenge students to see themselves as artists and thinkers, both individually and as part of a collective.
Whether sketching in a notebook, shaping a piece of clay, composing original music, or performing for a packed house, students are guided by expert teachers who understand that artistic risk-taking is academic risk-taking. Through exploration and reflection, students build technique alongside personal voice. They are encouraged to take creative and intellectual risks, work collaboratively, and engage with diverse traditions and contemporary forms.
In the visual arts, students learn to see and interpret the world around them with care. They develop the habits of artists: to look closely, make deliberate choices, rework an idea, and communicate powerfully through image and carefully chosen materials. Studio work connects to the broader curriculum and often responds to the city, to history, and to questions of identity and justice.
In performing arts, students practice improvisation, composition, and ensemble work. In drama, students build character and scene through play and rehearsal. In music, they explore global traditions and original composition, working closely with visiting artists and peers. In dance, students choreograph, embody movement from around the world, and study dance as a form of storytelling.
Across all disciplines, the arts at LREI foster deep engagement, sustained inquiry, and joyful experimentation. The result is not only a portfolio or a performance — it is a student with a voice, and the practice to use it with confidence, complexity, and care.
To learn more about The Arts in each division, click below.
In the Lower School, the arts are foundational — a core way that young children make sense of themselves and the world around them. From the very first years, students engage in rich, playful experiences across visual art, music, drama, and dance. These classes are not just expressive outlets, they are developmental laboratories where students explore materials, patterns, stories, and sounds with intention and joy.
Each week, students attend special area classes taught by dedicated arts faculty. In the visual arts, children learn to observe closely, work with diverse media, and express original ideas through color, shape, and form. In music, students sing, play instruments, and build rhythm and pitch literacy through movement and voice. In dance and creative movement, they use their bodies to explore space, storytelling, and collaboration. Drama begins through play; pretending, improvising, and finding one’s voice within an ensemble.
Across disciplines, the arts are deeply integrated with classroom studies. A first grade study of the neighborhood might show up in watercolors of the buildings; a third grade history project might include time machines made in wood shop. Arts teachers collaborate with classroom teachers to design projects that are both joyful and rigorous, always rooted in what children know and what they are ready to discover. The program culminates in fourth grade with a fully staged theatrical production that draws on years of growth in visual art, music, dance, and drama — giving students the opportunity to bring their creative voices together in a shared performance that explores the history of immigration in New York City.
The arts in the Lower School lay the foundation for creative thinking, confidence, and connection. They give young children powerful tools for observation, communication, and imagination that they carry with them as they grow.
In the Middle School, the arts are a central part of the academic and social experience — offering students space to explore identity, take creative risks, and collaborate. Our program includes visual art, music, drama, and dance, each taught by dedicated arts faculty who specialize in working with young adolescents.
All students in fifth and sixth grade take foundational courses in the visual arts and in music where they build core skills. Additionally, they get to choose a yearlong elective in an arts of their choice; some learn a new instrument while others choose to animate using different mediums. In seventh and eighth, they begin to specialize by selecting an Arts Major. In this two-year curriculum, students study the art form of their choice, learning how to express themselves in more and more creative ways, while also collaborating to craft complex and large scale pieces. While enrolled in their Major, seventh and eighth graders also choose from a menu of trimester-long arts electives that range from printmaking to improv, from stagecraft to song production. This structure encourages both breadth and depth, allowing students to discover new forms while also developing personal voice and technical fluency.
Across the arts, students learn by doing. In the visual arts studio, they might build cardboard sculptures that interpret or experiment with ink and collage. In performing arts, they rehearse monologues, compose original music, and learn to listen closely in ensemble work, and choreograph original dances.
Beginning in sixth grade, Middle School students can choose to participate in our after-school theater program, which culminates each year in a fall play and a spring musical — beloved traditions that showcase student leadership, creativity, and voice. Students may take the stage as performers or contribute behind the scenes through tech roles in lighting, sound, set design, and costuming. These productions are joyful, ambitious, and wholly collaborative — hallmarks of an arts program that sees students not just as participants, but as artists and makers in their own right.
High school students take art every trimester of their four years of high school, and have choose from the Visual Arts: Photography, Studio Art, 3D, Film Making, and Sewing; and Performing Arts: Dance, Theater, Vocal Performance, and Instrumental Music options. Students can specialize and study deeply in a particular discipline, or study broadly across the disciplines.
Outside of the classroom, students have expensive opportunity to engage in the Arts through the following programs:
- High School Theater Program: each school year the High School Theater Dept. produces a fall play and a spring musical. Auditions are open to all students, and there are no cuts. Each student who is interested can find a place in the theater, whether on the stage or working on crew to produce the show.
- Jazz Ensemble: led by Damon DueWhite, the Jazz Ensemble is a 9-12th grade group of musicians who perform at events across the school year.
- Chorus: The Elisabeth Irwin Singers rehearse during X-Block and perform at events across the school year. Led by Susan Glass, chorus is open to all students, and no prior choral experience is required.
- Coffee House Performances: LREI students often form bands while in Instrumental Music class in the music room, and these bands are the heart of the Coffee House program. In addition, students bring their vocal and comedic abilities to the stage during these community evenings.
- Literary Magazine: IE, LREI's student-run literary and visual arts magazine featuring art, poems, and stories by students grades 7-12, is a book-length collection published annually. Each spring, we celebrate its publication at the Lit Mag Coffee House release party, an evening of poetry, stories, music, and community.
- Spring Arts Showcase: Each spring, the LREI community gathers to celebrate the body of work created by LREI student artists during this gallery event, which showcases photography, paintings, sculptures, mixed media, and film produced during the school year.
Read more about The Arts in High School here.
