Best of the 207: Best Community Art Studio in the Greater Portland area, 2025

It’s Fashion Week at Mill Studio Arts. Twenty-two students, ages 6 to 12, are carefully gluing fabric clothing to tabletop mannequins under the watchful eye of Amy Bartlett-Goodness ’00. The kids are at the Biddeford studio for Fashion Camp, where they design and make the mannequins clothing for an end-of-week-fashion show. Amy, the founder of Mill Studio Arts, has taken community Arts education to a new level, offering after-school classes and week-long summer camps. “It’s r

I am an idealist and a creative. These are the founding principles that led me, six years ago to pursue creating a community based kid’s art studio over continuing to teach in schools. But please hear me when I say that I loved my job as a school art teacher. I mean I LOVED my job. I was lucky enough to work at a school that trusted their teachers to develop their own programming and to collaborate with other teachers in different subject areas. Without my public school teach