A Push for Creativity: AVPA SOVA Welcomes Ms. A as New Creative Director
AVPA is a CCHS institution. In 2026, the Academy of Visual and Performing Arts will celebrate its 30th anniversary providing CCHS students artists with afterschool art classes they couldn’t otherwise fit into their class schedules. AVPA is divided into five programs or “schools”: Dance, Music, Theater, Film, and Visual Art. Each school is its own community of student artists, run by a student leadership team alongside the adult “Creative Director.” This year, the School of Visual Art welcomed a new Creative Director, Alia Al-Harithi.
Al-Harithi, known to students as Ms. A, began her art career in the world of advertising, working on creative, award-winning campaigns for organizations like McDonalds and the Special Olympics and even on in-house designs for the Aerospace Corporation. But she realized that, if she continued in the industry and moved further up the ladder, she would lose a lot of that creative freedom as projects became more controlled. So, to return to what she really loved about art, Al-Harithi turned to teaching.
Al-Harithi’s passion for art began long before ad campaigns for McRibs. Her mother was an art teacher, so she spent her childhood experimenting with different styles and growing her own creativity. She continued to study art in college, first at SMC, then USC, and got her MFA at Otis College of Art and Design. This immersion in art is something she hopes to pass on as a teacher because, as she says,
“anybody can be creative, they just need to have that person push them a little bit.”
When she first applied for the job as an art teacher at CCHS, Al-Harithi, in addition to being a first-year teacher, had no idea the job came with AVPA. But being the Creative Director of SOVA, a program full of students who choose each week to stay after school and work on their art, was a welcome surprise, as was the student leadership team. The presidents of AVPA SOVA this year are seniors Jax Williamson and Helen Blaisdell, who, as veterans of the program, have done everything in their power to help new students feel welcome. To Al-Harithi, that is “the magic of AVPA.”
That’s not to say that it hasn’t been overwhelming. In addition to running SOVA after school, Al-Harithi teaches art classes throughout the school day. She’s getting the hang of running this huge, complex program, with around 30 freshmen entering just this school year, where students frequently enter art competitions and take dual-enrollment classes at local community colleges.
Still, to her, the most important thing for her is that students enjoy the program. She’s already working to get animation classes going for the freshmen, and she wants students to be able to experiment with new mediums they’ve never considered using before. Al-Harithi herself loves to paint, especially animals, but she also frequently works with ballpoint pen and colored pencils and even creates cardboard sculptures.
Al-Harithi spent a portion of her childhood in Saudi Arabia. Being Saudi is a part of her identity, and often comes out in her art. She knows firsthand that it’s important for people to express their culture and heritage in art because “art really is very personal.” SOVA provides a safe space for students to create art that is very personal and a space in which to share that art. And that tight-knit community of creativity is what all 30 years of AVPA have really been about.
