Making Art, Creating Careers: Building Georgia’s Creative Economy

The myth that artists starting careers in the media and entertainment industries face a future of Ramen noodles and “would you like fries with that?” can persist despite pretty good evidence to the contrary.

It’s not true, for instance, that earning an arts degree fails to connect graduates with arts employment. A report by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project found 80 percent of recent grads said their first job was “closely” or “somewhat closely” related to their field of training. And research reported by the Center for Cultural Innovation confirms more than 2.3 million Americans work full time as artists, a stable percentage of the total workforce. As many as 10 million adults earn income from doing creative work.