# The Hidden Labor of Teaching Artists

# This isn't missing. It's designed to be unseen.

I keep coming back to: how much of Teaching Artist work is actually visible?

This question feels especially urgent right now, as national conversations surface structural conditions around artist labor.

Much of that analysis correctly names job instability, nonprofit structures, and the absence of public infrastructure. This is not a new conversation. It is one I have been part of for years.  But I keep noticing a gap: the daily, relational, and sustained labor that makes artistic ecosystems function in practice. The labor stays invisible, and artists subsidize community programs.

If Teaching Artists were paid for the full scope of their work, the system would look very different. I’m positive because it’s happening.  Members of Teaching Artists of the Mid-Atlantic (TAMA), an all-volunteer, artist-led collective by and for Teaching Artists, are already modeling alternatives. Yet, they are rarely named in these national framings.

Why is that?

Over the next few posts, I’ll be naming what I see as consistently missing from the conversations:

• Divide and Conquer
• What Fair Pay Looks Like
• Stop Asking Us to Start Over
• The Cost of Maintaining the Wrong Structures

I'm starting here today - with the hidden labor and the work before the work. 

# The Work Before the Work

A Teaching Artist does not walk into a space unprepared.

Before a single session begins, there is:

• research, planning, and curriculum design
• adapting content for specific communities and learning environments
• communication with teachers, administrators, and partners
• aligning goals and expectations
• purchasing and preparing materials

This work is not optional. It is the foundation of the session.

And yet it is often unpaid.

Even when a curriculum is provided, it does not eliminate this labor. It simply shifts it. No artist can responsibly walk into a space without understanding how to adapt, translate, and respond to the people in front of them.

What is designated as “planning time” is often a fraction of what is actually required for ethical, responsive practice.

# The Work Between the Work

Let me ground this in a recent Friday:

I began the day in my bookkeeper role for a couple of hours, because I don’t have an accounting department, and if I don’t stay on top of it, the consequences fall on me with the IRS on my back. 

Then I joined a virtual planning meeting for a program I’ve been developing for over a year.

I ran downstairs to pack my bag ahead of an early start and an all-day Saturday event. 

I grabbed lunch, then drove to a third-grade classroom for the third session of a multi-week residency.

From there, I swung by a local printer to pick up handouts for my Saturday event. 

Then I went directly to a public library for a two-hour storytelling session with an aging-in-place community.

Teaching Artists rarely stay in one place.

We move:

• between schools and groups
• across neighborhoods
• across organizations and partnerships

Often in a single day.

Travel on that day is not just about time. It is coordination, cost, and energy.

It is arriving early to navigate unfamiliar spaces.

It is navigating traffic and unexpected delays.

It is adjusting when partner schedules change without warning.

It is checking email between stops to avoid missing critical communication.

It is carrying materials, setting up, and breaking down.

It is holding multiple programs, identities, and relationships in motion at once. 

This is the infrastructure that makes the work possible.

And it is rarely compensated.

Mileage may be reimbursed. Time is not.

# The Work During the Work

Inside the session, Teaching Artists are doing far more than delivering content.

We are:

• reading the room in real time
• adapting to different learning needs
• managing group dynamics
• responding to unexpected shifts
• holding space for creativity, vulnerability, and expression

This is not simply facilitation.

It is artistic practice, pedagogical judgment, and relational labor happening simultaneously, often under conditions we do not control, and are rarely empowered to change.

And again, even when organizations provide a lesson plan, it is only the starting point. The real work is what happens when that plan meets a living, unpredictable room.

# The Work That Keeps People Safe

There is another layer that is almost never named: safety.

Safety is part of the work, even when it is not written into the contract.

Teaching Artists are constantly assessing:

What is this space?

Who is in it?

What risks are present?

What needs to change?

In professional artistic environments, choices are carefully weighed based on context, responsibility, and risk. Teaching Artists bring that same discernment into schools, community spaces, and institutions, often without formal recognition of that discernment or the authority to shape the conditions in which they work.

# The Work After the Work

When a session ends, the work continues.

There is:

• follow-up communication
• reflection and adjustment
• documentation and reporting
• relationship maintenance

And there is emotional labor. Teaching Artists often hold:

• vulnerability
• personal storytelling
• moments of connection and rupture

That does not end when the session ends. It carries forward into the next room, the next community, the next day.

# The Work of Adapting

Teaching Artist practice evolves.

When I began working with elders, organizational training emphasized adapting facilitation for physical capacity and care needs. Important, but incomplete. It did not account for:

• First aid certification, and
• Care steps like locating defibrillators before a session begins

In environmental education work, I sought:

• Master Naturalist training
• Master Gardener training

This is not “extra.”

It is a professional responsibility.

It is how Teaching Artists remain accountable to the environments they enter, and how their practice deepens over time.

# What Gets Counted—and What Doesn’t

When compensation is structured around contact hours alone, most of the work disappears from compensation structures. 

Planning disappears.

Travel disappears.

Safety disappears.

Emotional labor disappears.

But the work does not.

And when it is not compensated, the cost is absorbed by the artist.

That subsidy is built into the system.

# Why This Matters

This is not only a question of equity.

It is a question of responsibility.

To artists.

To participants.

To communities.

When invisible labor is normalized:

• compensation appears adequate when it is not
• expectations drift away from reality
• burnout accelerates
• experienced Teaching Artists leave the field

And when they leave, what is lost is not only capacity, but continuity, trust, and depth of practice.

Communities feel that loss, even if it is not immediately named.

# What This Reveals

The issue is not that Teaching Artists are undertrained.

It is that the full scope of the work is structurally unrecognized.

And when labor is unrecognized, it cannot be fully resourced.

That is not an oversight.

It is a design choice.

# What Comes Next

In the next post in this series, I’ll explore how fragmentation in the field makes it difficult to collectively name these conditions.  Because fragmentation among workers shapes what is possible to change.

Visibility is only the first step.

The harder question is how to act on what we see.