Lara Kazan

Teaches at MAKE IT! Studio

After a long career designing in the fashion industry, Lara Kazan has left the fast pace of the industry for what she feels is a much more rewarding and fulfilling career of teaching sewing, fashion and other fun crafty creative skills. After spending a year teaching at the Guggenheim artist residency program at P.S. 8 she became convinced that this was where she was meant to be, and her new life path of educating began.

Last summer she was given the great privilege to teach at Brooklyn's Curious Jane, where she was able to spend consecutive full days really getting to know her students and seeing their skills improve tremendously throughout the course of the week. She fell in love with the idea of opening her own school. To gain more experience working with children, she has spent the last year teaching for different elementary and middle public after school programs learning how to work with children of different ages and most importantly finding out what projects they enjoy most and how best to stimulate their creativity. The classes she is teaching have kids from all different skill levels, so learning how she can manage kids who learn at different speeds has become one of her best takeaways from this past year.

Having run her own business for over 10 years, Lara is aware of the amount of work and diligence it takes to start a business. She is dedicated and passionate and will not be satisfied unless all her students are happy! Lucky for her she is a native Park Sloper who has very good friends that have planted roots there and her life long friend Jada Shapiro of Birthday Presence has offered to share her beautiful space in the heart of Park Slope. Her college friend and local artist Kara Kramer has offered to be the guest teacher during one of our summer sessions.