ABOUT US

Marquis Studios is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization providing arts-­in­‐education services to 150 New York City public schools annually. We strive to develop a strong partnership between artists and teachers by providing arts programs to supplement traditional classroom teaching techniques. Each residency or workshop focuses on a specific visual or performing arts discipline selected by school staff and administration.

Founded in 1977, Marquis Studios has served over 460,000 students, 26,000 teachers and 15,000 parents at schools throughout New York City. Working with a diverse population, 80% of programs serve students living at or below the poverty line with over 50% of all grant-funded programming serving classrooms containing with disabilities.

Marquis Studios Offers:

  • Core curriculum programming consisting of ten-­week arts residencies taught by our staff of trained Teaching Artists.
  • A full spectrum of arts residencies that encourage student exploration of visual arts, theatre, music, dance architecture, circus arts and puppetry.
  • Custom designed programs to meet the educational goals set by the school through collaboration with Marquis Studios and classroom teachers.
  • Programs that address New York State Learning Standards, both in the arts and academic areas.
  • Professional development for classroom teachers to provide arts education techniques and concepts that can be brought back to the classroom.
  • Parent/Child Workshops that help parents understand the connection between arts and academics while providing a fun, hands­‐on experience parents and children can share.

OUR TEACHING ARTISTS

Marquis Studios employs 83 professional teaching artists whom specialize in a variety of disciplines. If you are interested in becoming a Teaching Artist visit our careers page.

  • Babay L. Angles

    Babay L. Angles (Angelica Janabajal Tolentino) is a Pilipinx Brooklyn, NY-based choreographer, dancer, interdisciplinary performance artist, educator, and activist.  She was raised in South East San Diego, CA and Okinawa, Japan. She holds a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego and a Masters of Arts in Urban Education and Social Justice with a Single Subject Teaching Credential in Social Studies. She has over ten years of experience as an educator, mental health worker, and grassroots organizer in South East San Diego and Oakland, CA.

    Babay L. Angles practices dance, ritual, storytelling, and community building in the languages of funk and soul.  She fuses Breakin’, Rocking, and Modern dance to create narratives of resistance to highlight the strength of people of color, womyn, queer communities, indigenous peoples and those at the margins.

    She is currently a 2nd year fellow for Betty’s Daughter Public Performance and Action Fellowship in 2018.  Her solo work, “May Malas Sa Loob Pero May Datating Pa,” explores the horrors and pains of a fragmented and maladaptive Pilipinx psyche in its process of decolonization.  It has been shown at Work Up 4.0 Gibney Dance, Minka Brooklyn, and the Hemispheric Institute.

  • Laine Barton

    Laine Barton, a theater, puppetry and circus artist, joyfully weaves theater, puppetry, movement and/or circus with a focus on literacy, social studies, and social justice into her residencies. Her programs, Last Night I dreamed the Circus, Mime Matters, The Science of Circus, Convince Me and The Brooklyn Bridge, among others, combine these elements into fun-filled, structured curricular experiences centered on the needs of students from early childhood into middle school. Laine’s theatrical and circus performances include the Kimtom Festival in Shanghai, China, summer fairs in the Western States, and locally for Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, Metropolitan Opera, TV’s All My Children, and the Big Apple Circus CCU (was on staff for 14 years). Her shows “Why Read..” and “Grandpa’s Unicorn” can be seen at theaters, libraries and schools throughout the N.Y and N.J. area. Laine has been a Marquis Studios teaching artist since 2014.

  • Kimberly Becoat

    Kimberly M. Becoat is a contemporary mixed media artist whose work is a stylistic abstraction with a conceptual investigation of new materials and visual experiences with social commentary.

    She uses a variety of art materials including acrylic paint, sumi ink, and watercolor as well as less conventional items like sand, tar paper, foil, candy wrappers and other detritus. Her most recent abstract & conceptual work is an investigation of urban environments meant to create “urban displacement”, such as in public housing – aimed to surgically remove “massive amounts of Blacks and Latinos” into designated forgotten pockets of city landscapes.

    Kimberly has been featured in a number of exhibits including her most recent solo exhibition, Welcome to Urbania at RUSH Arts Gallery NY, and her solo exhibit, New Abstractions at Essie Green Galleries, Capital One Bank in NY, BAMart at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, MoCADA Museum, (The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, the Deutsche Bank as well as the television shows, Netflix Original Series “Luke Cage” and the FX series, The Americans.

    A few other exhibitions include: Dadaesque, 701 CCA Gallery (Columbia, South Carolina), Respond, SMACK Mellon Gallery, (Brooklyn, NY) Honoring Romare Bearden, The Corridor Gallery (Brooklyn, N.Y.), Crown Heights Gold, Skylight Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, and Dirty Sensibilities: A 21st Century Exploration of the New American Black South, at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, New York, NY

    Kimberly is a native New Yorker, born in Harlem NY – and presently resides and works as an artist in Brooklyn, NY.