About

ESAVA has won a reputation as one of the world's most dynamic art programs.  This is due in part to a simple reality - we do not teach people art.

Certainly not in any commonly known sense.  Instead, we provide structure and clarity and time and space and materials and environment and community to allow people to determine likely unchanging aspects of themselves and build futures for themselves that may or may not include art making.

Art that is made at ESAVA endeavors to take responsibility for five critical elements essential to honest communication and a function enlisted by those works of human achievement we now consider most successful.

Members of our expanding international community commit to an engagement that is empathetic, vulnerable, and as unconditional as possible in order to slowly evolve society towards shared and positive outcomes. 

In 2013-2014 ESA won 50.5% of all International Regional Art Awards in the 2014 Scholastic Art and Writing Competition, and 83% of all Film Awards, and 21% of all Writing Awards - in the world outside of the USA.  In the National Round, total awards to countries placed the USA in first, ESA in second, Korea in third, and the UK in fourth.

We believe that ESAVA receives the most full scholarship offers and more top scholarship offers of any high school art program in the world.  At this time approximately half our graduating students enter portfolio based programs, the other half entering primarily science based programs.  This is not a fluke - what we do in ESAVA closely mirrors contemporary thinking in some of the more creative fields of science today.  Our students are enormously successful.

ESAVA offers our students a wide range of local, national, and international exhibition opportunities every year.