What started as one teacher’s volunteer project in 1985 has grown into a program that’s reached over 3 million students.
Meet the Masters brings art history to life through interactive, multimedia lessons that students remember for decades. Our founder Bonnie Steele saw art programs getting cut from schools and decided to do something about it. Today, we’re in over 1,000 schools and districts across all 50 states, still teaching with that same passion..
Founder Bonnie Steele explains why she created Meet the Masters and how it’s helped millions of students discover their creative confidence.
How It Started 40 Years Ago
In 1985, Bonnie Steele watched art education disappear from her daughter’s sixth-grade class at Del Lago School in Mission Viejo, California. As a credentialed teacher and exhibited artist herself, she knew what these kids were missing.
So she created a volunteer program to fill the gap.
While teaching sixth graders, Bonnie discovered something important: by age 12, many students had already decided whether they were “creative” or not. She needed to reach them earlier. That realization led her to develop a complete K-8 curriculum featuring 35 master artists from around the world, each with hands-on projects that proved every student could create real art.
The program spread faster than anyone expected. Teachers saw their students genuinely engaged. Parents volunteered because the scripted lessons made them feel confident. Principals watched art transform their school culture.
Forty years later, we’re still teaching with that same passion Bonnie brought to her first sixth-grade class.
How It’s Going 40 Years Later
We’ve grown to 45 credentialed teachers and staff serving over 1,000 schools and districts. But our mission hasn’t changed: give every student the chance to experience art at its best.
We believe art reveals something fundamental about human nature. The creativity, the beauty, the way different cultures express universal experiences through color and form. Students who learn about Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits or Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series don’t just learn techniques. They discover that art connects us across time, place, and circumstance.
That’s why we’re still here after 40 years. And why we’re just as excited about tomorrow’s students as we were about that first sixth-grade class.
“Mankind’s most enduring achievement is art. At its best, it reveals the nobility that coexists in human nature along with flaws and evils, and the beauty and truth it can perceive. Whether in music or architecture, literature, painting or sculpture, art opens our eyes and ears and feelings to something beyond ourselves, something we cannot experience without the artist’s vision and the genius of his craft.”