The LEAP (Liberal Education for Arts Professionals) Program is a Bachelor’s in Performing Arts online degree completion program uniquely designed for current and former professional dancers. The LEAP Program is a 124-unit program that provides remote learning and affordable higher education of exceptional quality with a part-time, low-impact class schedule. The program can be completed in approximately 3 years if taken consecutively, depending on the number of units students are able to transfer into Saint Mary’s.
LEAP provides a well-rounded liberal arts curriculum covering topics within the humanities as well as social, natural, and formal sciences. All courses are taught by incredible faculty from different core requirement disciplines such as English, Math, Anthropology, Biology, Theology, and Performing Arts, with attention to adult learners and experiential learning. Small class sizes with cohort-style learning encourages learning-in-dialogue, networking, and provides support systems to ensure student success.
The Bachelor’s in Performing Arts supports many professional performers transitioning from the stage to the next stage of their career. LEAP graduates have gone on to excel in various careers and industries, including Arts Management and Education, Health and Medicine, Media, Journalism, Communications, Business, Technology, and Law and have attended some of the country’s top graduate schools.
Program Director
Shaunna Vella (MFA), svella@stmarys-ca.edu
LEAP Program Learning Outcomes
- Demonstrate a familiarity with a wide variety of academic disciplines;
- Demonstrate competence in the skills of careful reading, analysis, critical thinking, interpretation, and communication in both written and oral forms;
- Demonstrate competence with information literacy;
- Construct and Apply knowledge of professional performance and life experience to new learning;
- Examine the complex intersections of social identity that illuminate the construction and reinforcement of systems of power and inequality;
- Reflect an understanding of the impact of their own academic experience and how it prepares them for a life of active citizenship and continued learning.
Return to: