News & Community

We are thrilled to announce that we will be providing the OSAI at Home experience through the fall semester for select high school students! We're calling this new program OSAI at Home Academy.

Arts Educators—please nominate your exceptionally talented students for OSAI at Home Academy by Monday, August 24. The nomination form is linked below. Once we receive your nomination(s), we will follow up with each student to complete the application process.

Every accepted student will receive a full scholarship...

What were you like in high school?

I was quiet—much shyer than I am now—but also friendly. I was also really short. I grew five inches in college!

What's something you wish you could tell your younger artist self?

Being an adult is so much fun! I used to have a fear that time was going by too quickly because, as a dancer, getting older marks the end of your career. But, each year gets better and better! 

Tell us about one thing you...

The counselor-liaisons at the Summer Arts Institute are our secret weapons. They’re as adept at having a cabin meeting heart-to-heart as they are in helping students with their artistic work. Many of them are OSAI alumni who went through the Quartz Mountain experience themselves, and they’re also working artists in their own right—skilled in the disciplines in which they serve as OSAI liaisons.

We talked to a few of the liaisons who will be working with us on OSAI at Home: Lizzie Forman (Acting), Emily Lower (Dance), Tyne...

As the start of OSAI at Home creeps closer and closer, check out our recommended reading, watching, and listening for students to familiarize themselves with two of our incredible 2020 guest artists!

Jad Abumrad is the host and creator of Radiolab, a public radio program broadcast on 524 stations across the nation and downloaded more than 9 million times a month as a podcast. Abumrad employs his dual backgrounds as composer and journalist to create what's been...

Konrad Eek, one of our OSAI at Home instructors, has been working with the Arts Institute’s photography program since 1991. In many ways, to know Konrad is to know Quartz Mountain. We recently caught up with him to ask about his days as a young artist.

What were you like in high school?

In high school, I was a naive little dweeb. I was 6’3” tall and 135 pounds. If I turned sideways and stuck out my tongue, I looked like a zipper.

What were some of the first...

“If music is communication, then the purpose of music is being able to get ideas out there,” says Allen Tinkham, Music Director of the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra who conducted the 2015 Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute Orchestra and will also lead instruction for the orchestra students this summer during OSAI at Home. “The older I get and the more I study music, the more I realize that music is metaphor. It is everything.”

When Tinkham conducted the 2015 Institute Orchestra, he was...