Duke Ellington School of the Arts:

Partnership between District of Columbia Public Schools, The Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and The George Washington University

Duke Ellington School of the Arts is located at 35th and R Streets NW in Georgetown, Washington, provides talented high school students with the opportunity to achieve both academic and artistic excellence. This dual emphasis forms the foundation upon which an Ellington education is built.

Ellington developed from the collaborative efforts between Peggy Cooper Cafritz and Mike Malone, founders of Workshops for Careers in the Arts in 1968. Workshops grew to become Duke Ellington School of the Arts—an acredited four-year high school program combining arts and academics. At its start, Ellington represented a partnership with the Ellington Fund—a non-profit organization that has since raised millions of dollars to supplement money allocated to Ellington by the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). This partnership between the public school system and a private non-profit organization worked to ensure the highest level of academic and artistic training opportunities for Ellington students. Now, twenty-seven years later, the Ellington partnership has evolved to include a partnership with DCPS, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. and The George Washington University. This partnership continues to provide high school students with an educational experience that includes college preparatory academics, pre-professional artistic training and access to the cultural and intellectual resources of the District of Columbia.

Since August 2000, Mitzi Yates has been the principal and CEO of Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Prior to this position, she was the head of the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, an arts magnet high school in Hartford Connecticut and the Center for Creative Youth at Wesleyan University. She served as a member of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts for three terms, appointed by the House Speaker of the General Assembly. Currently she is the President of the Board of Directors of the International Network of Performing and Visual Arts Schools, an association of arts-focused schools: K–12 public, independent and residential.

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