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 performing
artist.

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 Dance
Festival, 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, and
community 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