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The Philadelphia Arts and Education Partnership has a new executive director, who is facing a new landscape for funding teaching artists.

Anjoli Santiago has taken the helm of PAEP just as a state program dedicated to teaching artists has been eliminated. Last year, the PA Council on the Arts rebranded itself as PA Creative Industries and streamlined most of its grant divisions into a single program, cutting the program specifically for Arts in Education.

PA Creative Industries has also discontinued its regional partnership program, which relied on local coordinating organizations to foster grants. PAEP was the PCI’s Philadelphia partner for teaching artists. Santiago said that partnership represented about half of PAEP’s operation.

“It is a big piece of the pie,” she said. “It is also not just the funding, but it is the loss of trust in what arts education could do and the impact that it has for our society.”

Before her promotion, Santiago had been PAEP’s program director since February 2025. She has had a lengthy career as an arts administrator, including stints at Classroom Champions and the Philadelphia Theatre Company.

Beyond her day job, she is a performer, writer and teaching artist. Santiago has had gigs with the now defunct Amaryllis Theater, Power Street Theater, WHYY on its podcast “Philadelphia Revealed,” and even with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, teaching a nature writing workshop at the John Heinz Wildlife Preserve at Tinicum.

“I just stretched a BA from Temple theater as far as I could,” she said.

Leveraging the arts in STEM subjects

The PAEP is a non-profit that supports arts education in schools, typically with teaching artists, and encourages schools to incorporate the arts into other school curricula, including science, technology and math.

“I see it being cushioned through the framework of design thinking: Try, try again,” Santiago said. “It is the same road map as the scientific method, which is the same road map as creativity in writing a poem, in writing a play, in creating a sculpture with your hands and creating music beats. There is always a revision process. True in science, true in the arts.”