An Inspired Education
At Greenville’s Fine Arts Center, high school students follow their passions
On April 10, 2025, the Peace Center Concert Hall will host some pretty impressive talent. Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Marcus King; comedian, actor, and writer Rory Scovel; and violin virtuoso Kelly Hall-Tompkins are scheduled to appear.
These performers may as well call it a school reunion. As former students of Greenville County’s Fine Arts Center (FAC), they will be inducted that night into the school’s inaugural Hall of Fame, at an event celebrating its 50th anniversary.
Like thousands of other Greenville County students before and after them, the Hall of Fame inductees split their school days between FAC and their home public high schools. The students—more than 450 each year, from all 15 Greenville County schools—come driven by a passion for the fine arts. If they’re accepted after an application process that judges their skill, interest, and commitment, they can immerse themselves in a curriculum of pre-professional studies in architecture, theater, dance, visual arts, music, creative writing, or filmmaking, drilling down into sub-specialties as their interests compel them.
Senior classes usually average $10 million in scholarship offers each year; “sometimes even more than that,” says Vee Popat, FAC’s director since 2019. About 90 percent of the school’s graduates will go on to higher education, and 70 percent will further pursue their subject of interest in college. No matter what field they choose, the graduates of FAC take something essential with them.
“I think the greatest value is in the ‘professional’ part of ‘pre-professional,’” Popat says. “It doesn’t really matter what career path they choose, even if they go straight into the workforce. What we’re giving them here is a professional experience and the expectations that are surrounding that–being able to work with others, listening skills, tolerance, patience, openness. Being on time is critical here. We’re trying to plant the seeds of professionalism.”
The Leadership in Arts Award is “an incredible honor,” Popat adds. “It’s reflective of the work and the thought and the energy that has been put in over the past 50 years. We receive it on behalf of all those who came before us who built the school into what it is.”
Greenville’s Fine Arts Center opened in August 1974 on the campus of Hattie Duckett Elementary School on Washington Street. The original curriculum was developed by a committee that included its first director, Virginia Uldrick, a towering figure in the local arts scene, whose statue now towers near the entrance of another school she helped launch in Greenville, the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities.
In 2008, FAC moved into its current space, a newly built 65,000-square-foot facility next to Wade Hampton High School, a transition overseen by the school’s longest-serving director, Roy Fluhrer, who retired in 2016 after more than 25 years of service.
“The FAC is kind of stitched into the fabric of the Greenville arts scene,” says Popat. “This community gets it, and we always feel that they value what we do here and across town at the Governor’s School. They have a deep desire and yearning to have meaningful artistic experiences here.”
Of course, artistic experiences don’t always come easy—a struggle that Popat, a musician himself, shares with his students.
“The faculty, collectively, appreciates the students who work their way through the struggle,” the director says. “We give them very challenging material in a supportive environment, and probably the most valuable thing they can learn is how to be resilient in their work.”
Fine Arts Center Facts
Founded in 1974
South Carolina’s first public high school for the visual, creative, and performing arts
Arts Schools Center Exemplary School
Arts in Basic Curriculum (ABC) Institute Model School
FAC’s architecture program received a national award for its work building tiny homes for people experiencing homelessness
Click here to learn more about the Leadership in Arts Award and the other Charitable Giving Awards.