Julia Lee Performing Arts Academy

Julia Lee: Bold & Beautiful

Who is Julia Lee? Students at Julia Lee Performing Arts Academy in Lake Elsinore went to Kansas City to find out, and the school brought in filmmakers to finish the story. Founder Tanya Lee named the school for her great-aunt, and the trail runs through 18th and Vine: the Mutual Musicians Foundation, the American Jazz Museum's Blue Room, the Black Archives of Mid-America and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Historians, archivists and the children of her bandmates tell how Julia went from her brother George's orchestra to the piano at Milton's, Capitol Records and the 1949 White House Correspondents' dinner, where she sang for Harry Truman and didn't tone it down. Back home the students sing, paint and perform, and in a Kansas City snowstorm Tanya makes her case online to the Missouri Charter Public School Commission to bring a Julia Lee school to the city her great-aunt called home.