Arsht Awards 2025: Lilia Garcia

By Carlos Frías

Lilia Garcia wasn’t yet in high school when she insisted that she and her parents had to move. The family had recently arrived in the United States from Cuba, and was lucky to afford a cramped apartment in Wynwood. But Garcia had learned in her middle school that a new arts teacher had started a novel program at Miami Central High, where students could earn a high school diploma and a vocational art degree at the same time. Garcia’s family didn’t live in that district.

Garcia, whose mother often said her daughter was “born with a paintbrush in her hand,” couldn’t stand the idea that she couldn’t study art just because she didn’t live in the right area.

“I made my parents move,” Garcia says, laughing at the memory. She wanted to ensure no other family would have to face a similar choice.

Garcia, the 2025 recipient of the Arsht Education Champion Award, would go on to start Miami-Dade County’s first talent-magnet program, the Center for the Expressive Arts, as part of her 35-year career in the school system. That innovative curriculum paved the way for more than 30 nationally recognized magnet schools in the county, including New World School of the Arts and Design and Architecture Senior High School.

It all started with the obstinance of a girl who couldn’t live without art. At home, a rented house in Wynwood, Garcia helped her mother, Lilia Parra, a seamstress in Cuba, stitch together belts for the local textile factory. She helped cut fabric and sew dresses so that her mother could exceed her quota.

Her father, Francisco Parra, was proud of her spirit. A Spanish-born footballer, he had fought with the French Resistance during World War II, and was later jailed in Cuba for opposing Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro before immigrating to the United States.

The family’s move allowed Garcia to study at a high school where the teacher, a retired ad executive, ran the art program like a professional. “He taught us like we were working for him at an ad agency,” she says.

Garcia graduated from Miami Central with a full scholarship to study art at the University of Miami—and a job in graphic design. But designing ads for picky clients—making changes at the last minute, rushing them to print in the Miami Herald—isn’t how she wanted to practice her art. She wanted to share her love of art with others, to inspire them to find the artists inside themselves.

She began teaching art, first at Palmetto Senior High, later to fifth- and sixth-grade students and eventually to students in second and third grade. She wanted children to learn early on that art could open up new ways of thinking.

She could structure an entire curriculum around an artist like Vincent Van Gogh. Reading might involve learning about his history, and math on using the dimensions of his works to calculate area and volume.

“We taught the whole curriculum through an artist,” Garcia says.

She watched students blossom. She knew art could be the gateway to open up a student’s mind to other subjects, and she wanted more children to experience it. Garcia thought if she couldn’t take the arts to every student in the county, she could bring some of the students interested in art to her.

Garcia used the county’s state-approved gifted program as a model: Students were bused from their home school one day a week to another school for advanced instruction. Garcia says everywhere the curriculum read “gifted,” she changed it to “talented,” and changed “gifted” program to “arts” program. “I wanted to start a program for talented kids,” she says.

The state agreed. As just a second-year art teacher, Garcia started the program with two other teachers—she would teach art, the others would focus on music and drama—at Charles R. Drew Elementary. Today, Drew remains one of the county’s respected visual-and-performing-arts magnet schools. Children loved it, even if some resistant teachers at their home schools required the students to complete the homework they had missed.

“It made me happy, because these were kids like me, who grew up poor like I did, who sometimes had limited parent involvement in their lives because they had to work so much, like my mother had to,” Garcia says.

Getting the children to the school was a challenge. Buses weren’t always available, so Garcia, who owned a two-seat Nissan 280ZX, bought a Toyota SUV and picked up children whose parents couldn’t drive them.

Some teachers at the home school volunteered to carpool, including Gloria Fajardo, a teacher at Hialeah’s Bright Elementary and a onetime aspiring performer who said she wished a similar program had existed for her own daughter, Gloria Estefan.

“It made me feel that I could do more,” Garcia says. “If I could do that as a teacher, what could I do as an administrator?”

Garcia eventually rose to administrative director for the Department of Life Skills and Special Projects for Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where she helped oversee the expansion of the magnet programs. She focused on innovative ways to bring arts to students, fundraising and sitting on boards of major cultural centers, such as the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

Garcia encouraged institutions like the Arsht to think about arts education as fundamental to their missions and partner with Miami-Dade Public Schools in a “longstanding, transformative collaboration that has reshaped arts education in our community,” she says. The Adrienne Arsht Center’s successful educational programs include I am Me, a traveling play performed for free to Miami-Dade County public high school ninth graders, and Kitty Hawk, a musical for the county’s seventh graders that has been integrated into the state-approved arts curriculum.

This was the dream Garcia shared with her longtime partner, late artist and New World teacher Jim Hunter. He started a program at the Coconut Grove Arts Festival, where Garcia is a board member, so New World students can sell their art, sharing the proceeds with the school. The program has raised more than $100,000.

Garcia isn’t done. Her mission in retirement is to work with landlords and developers to carve out free studio space and living quarters for artists. She’s also worked to establish housing stipends for artists, as she did as a founding member of Miami Beach organization Oolite Arts.

Garcia quietly maintains her own art practice at home. She’s a multimedia artist who photographs collages she creates with paint, salt and found items on glass. But she insists her true practice is making space for other artists to create.

“That’s my art form,” she says. “They are my masterpiece.”

(Photo courtesy rbb Communications.)