Montgomery Media Arts Institute collaborates with West Valley Arts, producing short videos and curriculum for the ARTrageous Online! Education Program. We identify local thought leaders who are passionate experts in their field, and who have valuable ideas and experience to share. Through video interviews, we introduce 7-12th grade students to the presenters, and the curriculum we design around the presentations includes low-tech and high-tech option arts integration activities. This is available, free to all, on the ARTrageous website and on Canvas. 

The eclectic group of thought leaders include artists, entrepreneurs, activists, scientists, educators and more. Our features so far include artists like Pilar Pobil, a painter in her mid 90s who lived through the Spanish Civil War; actor, activist, and jazz singer, Dee-Dee Darby-Duffin; and treetop canopy biologist, Nalini Nadkarni, who to save trees convinced Mattel to design a line of Barbie scientists. 

In the pipeline for fall 2022 is Lorin Hansen, an exquisite Samba dancer breathing new light and energy into Utah; a Mexican immigrant entrepreneur whose mantra is “pay it forward” and who went from homelessness to founding Rico Brand products sold in all major grocery stores in Utah; Atem Thuch Aleu, a Lost Boy from Sudan whose charcoal sketching got him an airplane ticket out of the refugee camp and now with two masters' degrees, and having taught at Harvard, he has established a non-profit that helps African refugees still struggling; and Dr. Rob Davies, a Utah State University physicist and science communicator whose talent is talking about climate disruption, in story, laying out so clearly the scale of the risks we are facing and the scale of the response that is going to be required to meet this challenge. He puts all of this into a broader context of global change and offers a mindset that he believes such a response can emerge from. Check out what participants are saying about this engaging project.