Andrew Simonet (Artists U Founder and Director) is a writer and choreographer in Philadelphia. He founded Artists U in 2006. His debut novel Wilder, was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2018. He second novel, A Night Twice as Long, will be published by FSG in 2021. Andrew was, from 1993 to 2013, a founding co-director and choreographer of Philadelphia’s Headlong Dance Theater, along with his collaborators Amy Smith and David Brick. Headlong created collaborative dance theater in Philadelphia, and toured nationally. Andrew’s projects included CELL, a performance journey for one audience member at a time guided by your cell phone, and This Town is a Mystery, performances by four Philadelphia households in their homes, followed by a potluck dinner. Headlong’s work was funded by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, The Creative Capital Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Rockefeller Foundation MAP Fund, The Japan Foundation, and The National Endowment for the Arts. Headlong’s work was produced by The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, Dance Theater Workshop (NYC), P.S. 122 (NYC), Central Park Summerstage, The Jade Festival (Tokyo), The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. With Headlong, Andrew helped found Dance Theater Camp, annual festival of workshops and collaboration for professional artists that is entirely artist-run and free for all participants, and the Headlong Performance Institute, a school for experimental performance with full college credit. Andrew created and ran the Dance Program at the Lawrenceville School, a private high school in New Jersey, from 1995 to 2005. Andrew lives in West Philadelphia with his wife Elizabeth and their sons Jesse Tiger and Nico Wolf.

Michaela Pilar Brown (South Carolina facilitator) is an image and object maker, a multidisciplinary artist using photography, installation and performance.  Born in Maine and raised in Denver, Colorado. she studied sculpture and art history at Howard University, Always been a maker of things, she cut her teeth in the halls of a museum where her mother worked as a security guard.  She has been immersed in the culture of objects, their making and interpretation, her entire life.  Her full time studio practice explores the body through the prisms of age, gender, race, sexuality and history.  She considers memory, myth, ritual, desire and the spaces the body occupies within these vignettes.  The narratives move between past, present and surreal projections of the future, sometimes occupying these spaces simultaneously.   a new Venture, Mike Brown Contemporary, a mobile exhibition and project space specializing in bringing contemporary art and arts related programming to under-served communities launched this Fall.

Ashley Minner is a community based visual artist from Baltimore, Maryland. She holds a BFA in General Fine Art, an MA and an MFA in Community Art, which she earned at Maryland Institute College of Art. A member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, she has been active in the Baltimore Lumbee community for many years, and regularly visits communities throughout the U.S South and Latin America as well. Ashley works with several local and regional arts for social justice organizations including Alternate ROOTS. She coordinates Artists U Baltimore, a grassroots planning and professional development program run by and for artists, for the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. She is currently a PhD in American Studies student at University of Maryland College Park, where she is studying vernacular art as resistance in related communities of the U.S. South and Global South. Ashley was a 2016 Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellow with the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) in NY, NY. She is most inspired by the beauty of everyday people.

What We Do

Artists U is a grassroots, artist-run platform for changing the working conditions of artists.
Make art. Don’t starve.
We want to change the conversations artists have in our heads, with each other, and with the world.
We push artists to build lives that are balanced, productive, and sustainable.
We are skills-based, not need-based: we work to empower artists to create their lives and their art.
We don’t give advice. We don’t do things for you.
Everything we do is artist-to-artist and free for all participants.
We started in Philadelphia and now we work in Baltimore and South Carolina too (and sometimes in other places).
We have two tools: group meetings and one-on-one planning sessions.

We offer those tools in three different programs:

A little background:

I started Artists U in Philadelphia in 2006 because I was tired of seeing brilliant artists leading punishing lives, perpetually exhausted, broke, and discouraged.

The artists I saw were astonishingly competent and hard-working, but at every level of success, they struggled. Usually alone. It diminished their artistic practice and their impact on the world. Over time, many stopped making art.

And I was suspect of “professional development” for artists. I had attended many workshops over the years led by arts professionals, not artists, who showed little comprehension of the struggles artists face and the complex skills artists bring to their work.

I wanted something simpler, something grassroots. I wanted a barn-raising, artists coming together to take responsibility for our situation and changing our conditions.

I took a workshop from the Creative Capital Foundation, and there I heard something I knew to be true: we artists have the tools and skills we need to build sustainable lives.

I became a Creative Capital artist leader and traveled the country doing intensive weekend workshops. I wanted this work in my own community. And I wanted it to be long-term (more than a weekend) and local (led by artists from the community). I had this Big Thought: if we work with enough artists in Philadelphia, over time, we can shift the conversations in this community. I was thinking about “emergence” and “tipping points,” the ways ideas become infectious and take over:

Artists need to build lives that are balanced, productive, and sustainable.

Could we make this idea infectious? Could we tip our community of artists?

With Janera Solomon and Jennifer Childs, I started the Core Program in 2006. We chose 12 Philadelphia artists for the first year. We met as a group once a month to look at big issues, and each artist met with an artist facilitator once or twice a month to do their own planning work.

We were funded by Leveraging Investments in Creativity, a Ford Foundation program in partnership with local funders. LINC introduced me to a lot of other folks doing this work around the country. We got together at conferences and exchanged ideas. And Janera, Jennifer and I met each month and talked about how to empower our artists.

We expanded our offerings to include Planning Mondays, free one-on-one planning sessions. And we expanded to other places. In Baltimore, we started an Artists U program from the ground up. And in South Carolina, we partnered with the South Carolina Arts Council to train artist leaders and offer programming around the state. In all three communities, our goal is to train and empower local artist leaders to do this work in their own communities.

Building a movement, not a brand.

—Andrew Simonet