4/12/2026
Community Impact / Education and Outreach / Supporting the Arts
For more than 15 years, Marcia Robinson has carried a simple but powerful belief into classrooms:
The arts are not an extra; they are a pathway to connection, confidence and community.
As a longtime teaching artist with The Smith Center’s Southern Nevada Wolf Trap Early Learning Through the Arts program, Robinson works with pre-K teachers and their students to help weave music, movement and storytelling into everyday learning.
During multi-week residencies at local schools, Robinson collaborates with educators to create lesson plans that integrate the arts into literacy, math and social development. The goal is to make learning active and alive.
“We’re bringing literacy into the classroom not just by reading words,” she says, “but by singing them, dancing them, asking questions.”
Counting might happen through drumming, and self-expression might begin with something as simple as saying your name “like you mean it,” Robinson says. These exercises build leadership skills alongside academic ones.
ROOTED IN COMMUNITY
Robinson’s mission actually began long before Wolf Trap, rooted in her upbringing in East St. Louis, Illinois, where community engagement became part of her artistic foundation.
“I have always done community service and community engagement,” she says, recalling after-school days teaching dance in public schools. That early influence – shaped by her mentor, legendary dancer and social activist Katherine Dunham – continues to define Robinson’s work today.
Robinson has spent 32 years on staff at the West Las Vegas Arts Center, where she has watched generations of students grow up, many returning as professionals in fields like education and healthcare. “They got their life skills through the arts,” she says, “and now they’re flourishing.”
EMPHASIZING KINDNESS
That long view fuels her passion for early childhood work. She emphasizes kindness as a core lesson, something she says must be nurtured early and consistently. “If we can get them when they’re pre-K and keep watering that, it can make a big difference.”
Even after decades in the field – and a career performing in heralded groups such as The Platters – Robinson finds her greatest joy in teaching. Whether she’s leading a song, guiding a movement exercise or helping a teacher discover a new approach, the reward is in the spark she sees in others.
“Everybody has a purpose,” she says. “And that’s mine.”