What do working performers in the Washington, DC area know: Describing arts advocacy & community

This study examines how professional performers define arts advocacy and community, as a means to create practices and tools to empower them to advocate for themselves. Arts Advocacy adequately addresses the overall concerns of the arts sector and of established organizations. Yet in streamlining the advocacy process, a few major goals have to be selected, while the goals of different and smaller communities of artists receive varying levels of support, depending on the networks set up within each field. By examining the education, training, and work-lifestyle of professional performance artists, and documenting existing beliefs about arts advocacy and community, we can gain an understanding of how working performers' professional life affects their civic one. We can also enable individual artists' civic life to better their professional one. In the end, this study will show that empowering artists to self-advocate will give arts advocacy a much needed boost, but that it begins with working artists own beliefs and understanding about community and advocacy.