Lindsay Ballard has a passion for teaching the visual and performing arts. This is her eleventh year at Compass High School and she is ecstatic to be leading the creative arts program. Before coming to Compass, she ran the general music program, directed a choir, and was the music director for the spring theatrical productions at Charles Armstrong School for three years. Her previous experience includes teaching music, art and drama at Magic Apple Afterschool in Aptos California, running music and fine arts workshops through the Woodside Recreation program, teaching swing dancing while attending NAU, teaching private voice, piano, guitar, ukulele, and theatrical audition preparation lessons.

A Bay Area native, Lindsay has been studying music and fine art since the tender age of three. She began her music training in classical, jazz, and blues piano. She studied privately with a fine arts instructor who graduated from the Stanford fine arts graduate program. She studied education, fine arts, and theatre at Northern Arizona University but came back to the Bay to continue her music education at Foothill College where she received an excellence in music award and highest honors. She holds her bachelors degree in music through San Francisco State University. Lindsay is trained in voice and musical theater. She also has a vocational certificate in Swedish massage through Twin Lakes School of Massage in Santa Cruz California.

Lindsay has a special connection with children who have learning differences as she has one herself. Her teaching approach encompasses the needs of these types of learners. She primarily learns and teaches music by ear yet has a unique way of teaching music theory as well. She believes the arts are an outlet and a vessel for harnessing one’s gifts and talents. Her philosophy is that the visual and performing arts help students with learning differences to thrive and build self-confidence. The arts, especially music, help the brain grow in ways nothing else can. When children learn music, drama, and fine arts, they become a better student as a whole.