Seated in his office in the Old Library Studio on Northeast Hancock Street, Noah Kleiman looks very pleased with himself. He should. In its three-year existence, NW Digital Art Kids, the nonprofit of which he is the executive director and sole paid employee, has gained national recognition for teaching Portland youth (and quite a few adults) the basics of music production in a professional-caliber recording studio.

Kleiman, 27, has been with the organization since its inception and says it took over a year to get up and running after he signed on as director in 2003. I spent 13 months writing grants and working with the architect, he says. We still didnt have glass in the studio when we started classes. Progress is ongoing; the studio finally gets its street-facing front door this month.

It didnt take long for NW Digital Art Kids educational mission to move beyond its Hollywood home, as Kleiman has assembled a mobile music-production lab he takes on the road to use for teaching in local schools.

Ive done a fair amount of work with programs that focus on at-risk youth, because the students that participate in those programs tend to be really motivated by music, he says. Last year we decided that wed start being a little more proactive, not just trying to recruit students from poor areas...but instead going to where those students go, working at the schools or with programs that serve at-risk teens.

This year, Kleiman hopes to use computers donated by Reed College to build music labs at some of the schools he partners with, including the alternative high school Youth Employment Institute.

Kleimans students have been remarkably prolific: They recorded over 10 hours of music at the Old Library in the last year; some have written soundtracks for arts nonprofit Film Action Oregon; and several have told Kleiman they want to produce albums this year.

One of the privileges of doing this job is that I get to work with some of the most talented teen musicians in town, Kleiman says. Theyre just as amazing as you would expect some famous person to be, only theyre young, and arent particularly hard to talk to, and dont have an entourage.

With the program more popular than ever, Kleiman has big plans for the future, from the smallworking with the citys noise-control officer to teach about hearing healthto ambitious expansion of the studio and releasing a compilation of student works for sale.