Community Spotlight: Taína Vargas
May 1, 2026
Taína Vargas is our Teen Programs Manager, which means she leads our Teen Bridge Program as well as our Artist Residencies. She just joined the Eliot School’s staff this past fall, but she has already made a major impact on this year’s Teen Bridge cohort as an instructor and a mentor.
Teen Bridge is a year-round, multi-year program combining visual arts and woodworking education, experience, life skills, mentorship, job training, and employment. Participants collaborate with each other and teaching artists to develop their artistic, personal, and professional voice and skills. They also have the opportunity to join our summer intensives led by our Artists in Residence.
We sat down with Taína for this month’s Community Spotlight to talk about the importance of these programs in the teen participants’ lives and why they are more essential now than ever before.
Transcript
I'm Taína, and I am the Teen Programs Manager here at the Eliot School. I work with Teen Bridge, and I support our Artist in Residency Program.
What is your favorite artistic medium?
My introduction to art making is black and white photography, darkroom photography. Photography, I always come back to, and my favorite changes based on the season: some ceramics, some printmaking, some mixed media, some plant based. They all fit together in some way; the photography shows up in my printmaking, the papermaking shows up in my printmaking, and the plant material feeds all of it.
What were you doing before you started working here?
I've been a classroom and community art educator for a long time. I see all my working experience as related to youth empowerment; doing social justice related work with teens, teaching in Boston Public Schools as a classroom teacher, and as a visiting artist.
What initially drew you to the Eliot School?
Wherever there are young folks and there is art, that's where I want to be. So, making safe spaces for our youth to be when they're not in school and creating career pathways for creative minds. Also seeing how much peer mentoring is happening with the older teens supporting our younger members, and even my son, who is 12, when he steps into the space. So, I would say it’s the community that our young people continue to build for themselves.
What are you personally looking forward to most at the Eliot School?
I'm excited for the summer residency, and exploring organic materials, and creating spaces of belonging for our young people through the making that we'll do this summer.
What are your hopes for the future of the Eliot School?
More teens, more youth programming, more opportunities for our young people. Making sure that we continue to prioritize the arts not only in school, but outside of school, to bridge those gaps when our public schools get defunded or when federal funding impacts our ability to sustain the cultural work that's required in our communities. I know that there's a lot of work to be done, and I know that there's a lot of work being done around creating safe, creative spaces for young people. So, continuing to advocate for not only funding, but also making sure that our young people have safe spaces to be where they can explore themselves as artists.