About Us

The Imagination Celebration program began in 1977 as an outreach project of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It was created to develop arts awareness in school children and an arts alliance between educators, their arts counterparts, and the community cultural network.

The Kennedy Center Imagination Celebration Fort Worth became a national Imagination Celebration site in 1987 and was created and developed locally through a partnership between the 89,000 student Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD) and the community cultural network. Imagination Celebration Fort Worth Inc. is an independent non-profit organization, which has raised in excess of $7,000,000 over the past nineteen years to provide arts and cultural experiences for over 5,000,000 young people and professional development training to over 16,000 teachers since the organization’s inception. The work of Imagination Celebration Fort Worth is supported thorough generous grants and gifts from The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, The City of Fort Worth, The Texas Commission on the Arts, The Texas Education Agency, The Arts Council of Tarrant County, numerous private foundations, corporations and individuals from a local, state and national venue. Imagination Celebration Fort Worth has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts including two Chairman’s Extraordinary Action Grants, as well as two grant awards from American’s for the Arts. Imagination Celebration has also been awarded the Coming Up Taller award, the highest honor by the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 2008. The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts remains our partner and has selected this program as the national model for community arts and cultural collaborations, bestowing ICFW with the Kennedy Center Award for Excellence in 1993. Artists, cultural leaders, educators, community leaders, and youth, continue to celebrate learning and the arts with this organization and take great pride in this unique partnership, which utilizes the works of the finest artists, creators, performing arts groups and cultural institutions from around the world to strengthen teaching and learning.

Imagination Celebration Fort Worth creates, produces, and presents an annual yearlong series of programs with artists and arts and cultural institutions in our area and from around the world. Programs are created in partnership with more than 50 cultural institutions and the curriculum directors of the FWISD. All programs are co-curricular and intended not only to ignite students’ learning experiences, but also to be a direct component of daily classroom curriculum and to relate to the basic elements of learning as delineated by the U. S. Department of Education Texas Education Agency and the State Board of Education. Programs are prefaced by professional development training for teachers as well as specially designed curriculum guides, student study sheets called “Imaginotes”, and accompanying classroom books, films and other related resources. Professional development training has been a key element of our work since the organization’s inception consequently the teachers are Imagination Celebration’s greatest proponents. The programs are offered free of charge or at a minimal cost to students and teachers. Last school year (2007-2008), students from kindergarten through university participated in over 120,000 opportunities (seats available) in our community concert halls, world class art museums, cultural institutions, and in schools. In addition to the FWISD, all Tarrant County schools, public and private, are invited to participate. We have also done several outreach programs targeting rural districts in counties west of Fort Worth, and annually produce and present The Imagination Celebration Statewide Program for the Deaf to over 500 deaf students from across the state of Texas.

Through the Imagination Celebration partnership we are able to reach large numbers of students with their first exposure to the arts and particularly target students with special needs. All programs are interpreted for the deaf and provided first to students from lower socio-economic levels. Ethnic groups comprise approximately 70% of our audiences. ICFW has been cited for its work in raising multi-cultural awareness through the arts.

It is our philosophy that the arts inspire and communicate ideas and give reality to the past and imagined future. The arts aid in the development of critical thinking skills, enhance every discipline of study, and most importantly, should be accessible to everyone. As a not for profit organization, ICFW is dependent on generous gifts and grants from Government entities, private foundations, corporations and individuals to continue its mission to provide programs which create learning in, through and about the arts and enhance the education of students from Kindergarten through University, their teachers and their families.

Imagination Celebration Fort Worth’s model has been emulated in Monterrey, Mexico, with the co- creation of a Mexican NGO named TALENTUM. Our work with Mexico has created an ongoing arts learning partnership between us and has led us to opportunities to work with other international cities and countries.

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