Alexandra Rozenman as Teacher: Art School 99 and the Practice of Creative Confidence

Alexandra Rozenman’s teaching career grows directly out of her own life as an artist: Moscow-born, classically trained, shaped by Soviet underground culture, and later educated in the United States. Before she became known in Boston as a painter, illustrator, and founder of Art School 99, she had already lived through several models of art education: children’s museum classes in Moscow, the influence of dissident artists, formal academic training, and the professional pressures of building an art career after immigration. That range helps explain why her teaching is not limited to technique alone. It is also about confidence, self-expression, art history, visual storytelling, and the permission to take one’s imagination seriously.

Rozenman’s own comments suggest that teaching has never been merely a side business. After returning to Boston around 2009, she established Art School 99 in Allston (later moving to Somerville), and by the early 2010s she was already describing a life in which teaching occupied nearly every day. The school became a place where her identity as a working artist and her identity as an educator merged. She has spoken of art as a tool for personal growth and of teaching adults with the ideal that a strong teacher should not only explain, but inspire.

Through the years, Art School 99 has developed into a studio with several different directions rather than a single-track painting class. Its offerings include children’s drawing and painting, adult classes, adult-and-teen open studios, collage and mixed media, watercolor, beginner drawing, private lessons, one-year personal programs, seminars, art parties, and couples’ workshops. This variety is important because it shows Rozenman adapting the studio to different types of students: children who need encouragement and structure, adults returning to creativity after years away, teenagers ready for more serious guidance, and couples or groups looking for a shared creative experience. 

Her children’s classes emphasize drawing and painting as developmental tools. The public course descriptions for Art School 99 stress creativity, confidence, fine motor skills, problem-solving, and emotional expression. In practical terms, children are introduced to observation, simple forms, still life, composition, perspective, shading, and different drawing media. The goal is not only to produce a finished picture, but to help young students learn how to see, choose, adapt, and develop a personal style. For adults and teenagers, the emphasis widens. Beginner drawing classes cover composition, perspective, shading, basic forms, objects, spaces, and figures. Intermediate drawing focuses on observational skills, value, expressive mark-making, and work in graphite, charcoal, ink, and mixed drawing media. 

Painting classes include watercolor, oil on canvas, acrylic techniques, color theory, brushwork, composition, texture, and the use of references. The adult classes appear to balance structure with flexibility: students learn the foundations, but they are also encouraged to discover their own creative process. One of the strongest features of Rozenman’s teaching is the way she connects technical instruction to broader artistic culture. Her personal programs and seminars include readings, movies, homework, critique, museum references, and discussion of contemporary art. This is closer to an artist’s mentorship model than to a casual hobby class.

Students present their work, discuss goals, receive critique, and are guided toward source material. That approach reflects Rozenman’s own background: she is a narrative painter deeply engaged with art history, European modernism, Russian conceptual traditions, Jewish visual culture, folklore, collage, and surreal imagery. 

The school’s collage and mixed-media offerings are especially connected to Rozenman’s artistic identity. Course descriptions frame collage through Dada, modernism, photography, found materials, text, storytelling, and surreal reassembly. Students are encouraged to rip apart and recombine images, papers, magazines, maps, tickets, photographs, and other materials into new visual hybrids. In watercolor classes, the focus shifts toward transparency, luminosity, washes, and the balance of spontaneity and control. In couples’ workshops, the pedagogy becomes social and collaborative: two people learn color mixing, brushwork, composition, texture, and painting techniques while creating a shared canvas.