Education & Classes in Fort Lauderdale

Guitars, banjos, and mandolins hang like artwork from Penny Lane’s red walls, immediately capturing the eye with names like Santa Cruz, Eastman, and Gold Star, and indicating the shop’s specialty in repairing, selling, and teaching a range of stringed instruments. Within this musical gallery, a deft staff lends its melodic expertise to fixing broken instruments—from guitar strings to bass necks—and promises to tackle any repair no matter how big or small.

Budding musicians—equipped with their own instrument or one from the emporium’s vast stock—an sit down with a distinguished instructor, who teaches players of all ages and experience levels how to play classical instruments such as the piano and violin, or more obscure music machines, including the banjo and ukulele. The shop also hosts monthly jam sessions, allowing students to gather on the store’s plush red couch and learn first-hand the important factors of group play, from keeping on beat to smashing guitars an arm’s length away from others.

With experience in cosmetology and business management, Octavia McDougle helps aspiring beauticians of all sorts forge new career paths as hairstylists, barbers, cosmetologists, and massage therapists. At Beauty Anatomy Institute of Cosmetology and Wellness, Octavia and her staff guide students in immersive programs that combine preparatory theory with hands-on practical application. Once they've learned the ropes, protégés get to practice services on real-life clients before they earn their licenses and find employment.

Students train on a 4,100-square-foot campus replete with four clinic areas and salon-exclusive products typically found only in premier salons and Walt Whitman’s finely manicured beard. Beauty Anatomy Institute also runs an outreach program to provide disadvantaged teenagers with scholarships, workshops, and grooming services to further boost their self-esteem.

Mambo Con Cache owner Brian Anthony spreads his fiery brand of salsa up and down the East Coast with studios in South Florida and New York. Set to the pulsating beat of Latin music, his classes keep students swiveling and sliding across the studios' spacious hardwood dance floors. Though Anthony brings his background in hip-hop footwork to the classes he teaches in Hollywood and Coconut Creek, his heart belongs to the salsa music he fell in love with early in his career. Whether popping in for a group class or a more intimate private lesson, students quickly grow confident as they practice the fundamentals of salsa by side-stepping with partners or high-kicking piñatas strewn about the studio.

Lazy Meadows Farm's internationally trained and USDF-certified owner, Michele Herrmann, focuses exclusively on studying and sharing dressage-style riding with students of all experience levels. Novice riders learn to trot from within two riding arenas, while more advanced riders gallop and prance past wavering palms and rustling pines. The docile equine animals inhabit 14 dressage stalls that share a verdant 5.5-acre landscape with a terra-cotta-roofed barn and a stock of big cats for very advanced riders.

Talin Lyman's delicate brushstrokes cover the walls of a former U.S. vice president's winter home, frescoes within InterContinental hotels in Tuscany and Rome, and furniture that adorns Martha Stewart's own abode. From canvases to murals to throws of pillows designed for people and pets, the virtuosic painter daubs blank spaces with flora and fauna inspired by her childhood spent traveling to far-flung countries with her missionary father. Lyman also throws open the doors of her studio for an array of classes geared toward adults—such as Painting to the Oldies—and children, where she intersperses hands-on activities with lessons about great moments in art history, such as the day Georges Seurat invented the polka dot.