— Founder and director
Jason Blair
Art teacher. Creativity specialist. Twenty years spent handing young people the wheel and documenting what happens next.
- Elementary art teacher, Abraham Depp Elementary, Dublin City Schools
- Educator-in-Residence, Columbus Museum of Art
- Harvard Project Zero — Cultivating Creative and Civic Capacities, a five-year research collaboration
- Board member, Human Restoration Project
- Standards work with the Ohio Department of Education
- MA in Art Education, The Ohio State University
- Outstanding Educator Award · Community Champion Award
- Founder, Grow Creative Thinkers — keynotes, workshops and professional development
01 Origin
Why the festival exists.
Students are capable of far more than school usually asks of them. Given a real question, room to fail, and someone who will actually listen, they produce work that adults underestimate — and almost none of it ever leaves the classroom.
In 2019 that observation turned into a festival. Four teachers from three districts and about 150 people gathered at the Columbus Museum of Art, and the students did the talking. The point was never to display finished products. It was to let young people show what happens when they are trusted with their own learning — and to let the adults in the room draw their own conclusions.
Seven years later it fills a high school for an evening, and the conversation has traveled further than the building.
