East Bay Center for the Performing Arts – Youth & After-School Programs

East Bay Center for the Performing Arts – Youth & After-School Programs offers music, theater, dance, media-making, and performance art classes. Group classes include music, dance, and performance art classes that are described as fun and free. The program includes a Young Artist Diploma Program with resident ensembles, an intensive six-year interdisciplinary diploma program, advanced internships, and commissions for new works of art.

• Ages: 4–18 years old
• Schedule: Business hours Monday–Friday 9:00 AM–5:00 PM, with instructional and rehearsal hours Monday–Friday 3:00 PM–9:00 PM and Saturday 9:00 AM–3:00 PM

Since 1968, more than 50,000 student artists have participated in East Bay Center for the Performing Arts programs over more than 50 years. The Center employs over 60 outstanding and committed faculty throughout its programs. Over the next 50 years, the Center plans to reach 75,000 more youth. East Bay Center for the Performing Arts states that it engages youth and young adults in imagining and creating new worlds for themselves and new visions for their communities through the inspiration and discipline of rigorous training in world performance traditions. The Center functions within the local ecosystems of greater Richmond, touching thousands of pre-K through high school students through in-school and after-school programs, and provides broad and strategic community-based and public school performing arts access programs that emphasize self-determined community projects and the cause of social justice, aiming to produce work telling Richmond’s story from a community and youth and young adult perspective.

Last updated May 13, 2026.