Lara Tootleman

I started my career in museum education in 2014 as an undergraduate intern, working across several different types of internships. I had an archiving internship, a historical interpretation internship where I dressed in 17th century costume and pretended to be a smallpox nurse and led historic tours through the old Trenton Barracks Museum, and I also worked at the Children's Museum of Manhattan and the Drawing Center as an intern where I led tours and did engagement with families. In 2017, I got my job at the Guggenheim, and while it's not the exact same role I've had for 9 years, I've been here in the same program for 9 years. I started as an education coordinator working on the Learning Through Art residency program, and I still work on that today, but have expanded throughout my role. I was an education associate for several years, and now I'm an associate manager of school and teacher programs, so I work on anything that's K-5 through 12. That could be school tours, after-school programs, school partnerships, residencies that we have inside the schools or at the museum, teacher professional development, and more. Most of my time is spent working on our Learning Through Art program, which is our residency program that's been happening for over 50 years at this point. It's a 20-week residency that begins in September every year and goes through June the following year, so it's a full school year, and we put teaching artists in a residency in a public school, and we cover all five boroughs. I manage 8 of our 12 residencies, which essentially involves managing the teaching artist, supplies orders, coordinating with the school, the principal, the teachers in the classrooms, checking on lesson plans and coordinating with them for their final project, which is then put on display in the Guggenheim for a month as an exhibition at the end of the year.