Studio Stories: Reminiscing on Twin Cities Dance with Cathy Young - Season 4, Episode 45

Cathy Young brings 34 years of experience as an artist and educator to her work as Executive Director ofBoston Conservatory at Berklee. During the course of her career she has been a performer with leading American dance companies, the artistic director of her own dance company, a nationally recognized choreographer and teacher of jazzdance, a professor of dance, co-founder of a college dance program, and the Dean of Dance at Boston Conservatory.Young grew up on a farm in a central Pennsylvania coal mining town. She earned her BA in Sociology and Women’s Studies from Harvard University, where she also got her first exposure to dance as an art form through an opportunity to take an African dance class. Falling in love with dance, not only for its physicality but for its ability to communicate emotion and create community, she made the decision to pursue it as a career, leaving former dreams of law school behind and embracing the joys and challenges of a life as a performingartist.She spent the next 20 years focused on building her career as a dancer, choreographer, artistic director, and teacher of dance. She has worked with leading artists in American contemporary dance and jazzdance, as well as creating a choreographic body of work and directing her own company. Her choreography has been commissioned by universities and professional companies around the country and abroad, and presented in prestigious venues including the Joyce Theater and Dance Theater Workshop in New York, Bates DanceFestival, and The Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. Her work has been supported by grants from foundations including The Jerome Foundation, McKnight Foundation, and Minnesota State Arts Board. In addition to her work in concert dance, Young has also created choreography for theater, opera, commercials, industrials, and film. As a teacher, she has conducted artist residencies at over 30 colleges and universities, as well as sitting on the faculty of numerous national and international dance festivals including Bates Dance Festival, Florida Dance Festival, and the Open Look Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia.After 20 years as a working artist, she returned to academia to earn her MFA in Dance at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, and accepted a position as an associate professor of dance at Ursinus College in PA, where she co-founded the dance program including full curriculum design, implementation of a dance major and minor, and creation of a student dance company. Young was named Chair of the Theater and Dance Dept., and focused her efforts on engaging students and faculty across the campus, in all academic disciplines, with the transformative power of the performing arts. During her time leading the Conservatory dance division, the BFA program has become recognized as the top contemporary dance program in the US. Young has overseen the implementation of a forward- thinking, comprehensive curriculum designed to prepare dance artists for 21st century entrepreneurial dance careers; and focused her efforts on building and supporting diversity within the dance division curriculum, artistic programming, and student/faculty population. This emphasis on diversity, innovation, collaboration, andcommunity as core values, expressed through the curriculum, training, and artistic productions, have attracted the top students, faculty, and guest artists in the field.In her current role as Executive Director of Boston Conservatory at Berklee, she is charged with strategy, vision, and oversight of all areas of the school, which includes three divisions (Music, Theater, and Dance), 200 faculty, and 850 students. Under her leadership, Boston Conservatory at Berklee has become known as an innovative, contemporary conservatory, creating new models of performing arts education and preparing students to be the performers, teachers, content creators and change-makers of our collective fut