Oakland School for the Arts was founded as a charter school in the Oakland Unified School District through the efforts of then Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown. It received 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in October 2001. The school opened its doors in September 2002 with a ninth-grade class and added another high school grade each subsequent year. A middle school was added in 2005. In the 2024–25 school year, OSA had 825 students enrolled in grades 6 through 12.
Loni Berry was the director of the school for the first four years, succeeded in the 2006–07 school year by Saul Drevitch. From 2007, Donn Harris was executive director and also artistic director. Since February 2022 the executive director is Mike Oz, who was previously the principal and succeeded Lisa Sherman-Colt.
OSA began with seven arts emphases: Theater, Dance, Literary Arts, Instrumental Music, Production Design, Visual Art, and Vocal Music. During the 2005–06 school year, Production Design was merged into Visual Arts. Faced with budget cuts in 2006, the school merged Theater, Arts Management, Literary Arts, and Visual Art and Design into one Theatre emphasis. In 2007, Literary Arts and Visual Art returned to separate emphases. In the early 2010s the school also offered a Circus Arts emphasis, which won awards, and a Figure Skating emphasis was introduced in 2013.