East Bay Center for the Performing Arts Youth Programs

East Bay Center for the Performing Arts Youth Programs offers music, theater, dance, and media-making through classes, lessons, ensembles, and private lessons. Group classes in music, dance, and performance art 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 generally 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 Youth Programs, and the Center states that over the next 50 years it plans to reach 75,000 more youth. The Center employs over 60 faculty members across its programs. Its mission is to engage 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, reaching thousands of pre-K through high school students through in-school and after-school programs that connect to more intensive classes and lessons at its permanent 11th Street home. It provides community-based and public school performing arts access programs, emphasizes self-determined community projects and the cause of social justice, and aims to produce work that tells Richmond’s story from community and youth and young adult perspectives. The Center describes a focus on rigorous training in world performance traditions, a permanent home in the Winters Building, and an aim to support new generations of artist-leaders trained at the Center.

Last updated May 13, 2026.