LEAP

LEAP Into Your Future...

The Liberal Education for Arts Professionals (LEAP) Program provides professional dancers and other performing artists a unique path to access higher education - a community for whom access to college has been traditionally rare or impractical. Founded in 1999, The LEAP Program is specifically designed to deliver a comprehensive liberal arts education to professional dancers and performing artists from around the country, with the goal of completing a Bachelor’s Degree in Performing Arts from Saint Mary's College of California through part-time study. 

 

LEAP Core Values

 

- We are committed to co-creating an inclusive community of learners that honors years of work within diverse fields of The Performing Arts.

- We champion embodied knowledge and experiential learning as integral components of our curriculum.

- We believe diversity, multiculturalism and systemic change are foundational to our success within the program, our campus community and our professional field.

- We value a “learning in dialogue” model of instruction, and believe that artists are vital to social change, and that our differences are our strengths.

- We encourage transformative learning that centers each student’s interests and acknowledges that each student’s path to graduation is individualized. 

 

 

The LEAP Program stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. CLICK HERE to read our statement.

 

The LEAP Program stands in solidarity with the Stop Asian American Pacific Islander Hate movement. CLICK HERE to read our statement. 

 

The LEAP Program recognizes that the Saint Mary's College of California campus occupies the ancestral lands of the Sacian Tribe, whose descendents are now organizing into the Muwekma Ohlone tribe. In addition, as a national program serving students who reside all across the area we call the United States, we recognize the thousands of Indigenous tribes that have, and continue to, steward these lands.

Learn more at Native Governance Center's A Guide to Indigenous Land Acknowledgement.