Haunt Camp is an extracurricular club that teaches design, fabrication, & performance art to high school students. Each year, our team of collaborators builds an avant-garde haunted house for the whole community to enjoy. It’s more than just a Halloween goof: students learn technical skills used in well-paying creative careers.

Our objectives are youth empowerment & community collaboration. We give teenagers creative control of an enormous installation & performance—a showcase of youth art with far wider public appeal than the average high school play. Students have the opportunity to connect with actual professionals in creative fields with our instructors & guest artists. Haunt Camp demonstrates a history of genre-bending cross-collaboration with other local arts nonprofits.

The target age for the youth we serve is 13-21 as part of our core team, offering 4+ classes per week in our summer-through-fall camp. We regularly host all-ages special events to draw in families & other community members. Our campers collaboratively design the narrative of each year’s attraction, storyboarding the rooms & characters to be found within. We create the set & props using carpentry, large-scale sculpture, scenic & mural painting. Characters & creatures alike are generated through costuming and SFX molding & casting. Audio & lighting design adds the truly supernatural finishing touches, and the teens star in our theatrical Halloween production. In addition to art, students learn practical skills & safety around power tools and the set environment. In contrast to most fine art education, as one student once exclaimed, “I’ve never worked on an art project larger than ME!”