Academy Updates - June 2023

Lucas Raagas, Academy Manager, is prepared to welcome Cohort 6 on their first day!

After a long and competitive admissions process, we kicked off our sixth cohort of the Media Arts Apprenticeship program on June 20th! With a record high of 57 applicants in a single year, we accepted our largest group to date of nine apprentices. We are also excited to announce that our MAA program has moved to Boston! The training portion of the program will mainly be taught in Downtown Crossing, The Loop Lab’s newest location. This allows us to teach more students and take advantage of capturing the sounds and visuals of this lively area.

Cohort 6 roster:

  • Xavier Asamoah

  • Destiny Cuevas

  • Kuran Freeman

  • Nino Leite

  • Soti Levy

  • Anna Montano

  • Noel O'Neil

  • Andres Osorno

  • Chelsey White

Some of our newest apprentices test out lighting and diffusion.

This year’s admissions saw a total of 57 total applicants, up from 39 total applicants in 2022, and we had 18 applicants reach our final round of internal deliberation, an improvement from 13 in 2022. After deliberate and conscious outreach efforts, we are welcoming in more women than we have had in a single group, and more Cambridge folks (3) than we have had since the beginning of The Loop Lab! Here’s a more specific look at the demographic breakdown of applicants from 2022 to 2023:

Additionally, our high school programming will be taught by two new instructors, starting with Cambridge’s MSYEP program in July. Matt Feener and Xavier Montes (an alum of the MAA Program) are taking the lead and already in the process of creating their lesson plans, including use of the new software - Descript. We were happy to arrange a partnership with them, resulting in free access to their premium audio and video software (that also incorporates AI) for our students and instructors.

The Academy is looking forward to a host of exciting things in the upcoming calendar year. We are currently working on offering drone classes in partnership with Brandeis University, which will be offered to both our current students and alumni. Furthermore, we are adding a few exciting internship locations for our apprentices, and the official announcement of those partnerships will be announced at a later date, so stay tuned!