Zahra Ruffin is the director of Hobbyhorse. She is a member of the Middle School faculty and the Middle School Equity Coordinator. She has a BA in Theater and English from Dartmouth College. In her free time, she enjoys taking care of her plants and reading fantasy novels.

Brooklyn Robot Foundry has been offering creative STEAM programs for children and adults at their locations throughout New York City since 2011.  Their classes take all of the best aspects of art, engineering, and design, and combine them into a super fun, hands-on building experience.

Child’s Play NY faculty bring over a decade of experience teaching and directing in schools throughout New York. Our innovative acting curriculum, featured on Mt. Sinai Parenting, connects imaginative play, social-emotional learning, and sophisticated theater technique. Child's Play NY teaching artists have trained at some of the most esteemed drama schools in the world and continue to perform on and off Broadway, as well as in television and film. We are thrilled to bring our unique acting classes to Nightingale students.

CinemaKids is a Brooklyn-based youth arts STEAM program, offering children ages 5–5 the opportunity to explore the world of film, animation, and media arts in an engaging and interdisciplinary manner. We offer after school classes, in-school workshops, summer and vacation camps, weekend workshops, and more. Filmmaking is such powerful storytelling tool and an amazing all-encompassing process. Children who take a CK program often realize passions they never knew existed. Working closely with every student, our goal is to help them discover what they love about film and media arts. Our team sees movie making as a means to explore the world around us in a hands-on exciting way. CinemaKidz programs are interdisciplinary in their design and extremely hands-on; several include building, technology, historical research and critical thinking skills, writing, art, engineering, and more. For more information, visit: www.CinemaKidz.com.

The Craft Studio has been a staple in the lives of New York City children since founder Barbara Dansker opened its doors in 1994. It is a magical, friendly, warm, and inviting place where children of all ages can explore their artistic talents. The combination of a beautifully decorated spacious studio and an incredibly fun and creative staff is the perfect formula for imaginations to run wild.

Curated Care is a vibrant and feel-good community. Our "Kid Experts" are Broadway actors, Rhodes Scholars, Juilliard dancers, and Montessori teachers. We've created a platform that supports arts and education.

DramaZone® instructors are trained and certified by DramaZone® in addition to being outstanding artists and teachers. Our primary goal is to exercise both the mind and the body while making learning fun! Our teaching staff come with specialized and advanced degrees, and work on and off Broadway.

Jenn Pentecost is an art teacher and teaching artist with an extensive background working with students of all ages in schools and in a non-profit community arts organization as a visual art instructor and studio director. Committed to providing extraordinary creative thinking education and fostering creative courage in all people, she is passionate about embracing and nurturing every person’s creative self-esteem through the creative process, project-based learning, and individual learning styles. Her teaching practice is centered around the exploration of self and the exposure to a wide variety of materials and mediums. Each individual - through sustained, careful guidance in a supportive, creative environment - is capable of becoming an innovative thinker and doer. She holds a BA degree with a strong background in art history, from Ohio University and received the A+ educator award from the Columbus College of Art and Design in 2014.

Joel Hinds-Ortiz is the head chef at Nightingale. Prior to joining our kitchen, he worked at St. David’s, Argentelle Catering, and Special Events and Entertaining Ideas Catering. He enjoys teaching all his recipes to the children.

Kodely helps students take their technical skills beyond what they've learned in a classroom setting and apply them to the real world, helping them develop their skills around social-emotional learning. Kodely's the first design thinking enrichment program for PreK–8th grade. Our learning model is based on principles taught at Stanford d.school, IDEO, and used at companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

Top Level Chess teachers are committed to improving the minds and general thinking abilities of all who take our courses. Chess is a wonderfully intriguing game, with rich history and textured culture. Studies have shown that the game’s qualities have significant transference to other disciplines. In teaching chess, we understand that we are improving concentration, instilling a sensitivity for logical sequence, developing parallel and analogous reasoning tools, increasing analytic technique and vision, and establishing heuristic constructs and layered problem solving capability. We inspire every chess player’s pride, self confidence and generally creating mentally stronger and more resilient intellects⁠—the kind of positive tough⁠—mindedness needed to succeed both professionally and personally.