As we explore the ideas of MFA and PhD degrees, career paths, and job stability, I wanted to highlight ten artists who earned tenure within their respective institutions. The artists are listed here and the year when they received tenure. Click on any name to further read an artist's profile or personal essay, to learn more about their career paths towards these positions. The quotes below are excerpts from writing each artist has contributed on the blog over the past four years, sharing personal stories about teaching, the interplay of choreographing and teaching, creative research, and writing as an artistic practice.

Pamela Vail: Franklin and Marshall College (2015)

MFA, Smith College

I feel incredibly fortunate to have a job that focuses on dance and that challenges me. I also continue to perform regularly. My teaching life and my professional dance artist life complement and feed each other, and I continue to learn a lot, from both my students and my peers. Very fulfilling.

Jillian Harris: Temple University (2014)

MFA, NYU

My time at Temple University has drawn extensively upon the administrative skills I developed serving as an intern with the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities (Washington, DC) and as an assistant director of a regional arts festival from 1999-2001. I have embraced playing different roles (sometimes within one hour) and reinventing myself with each job that comes my way.

Elizabeth McPherson: Montclair State (2013)

MA, The City College of New York

PhD, NYU – Dance Education Program

I am passionate about staging dance works. A dance only really "lives" in performance, so it is vitally important to the dance field that older works continue to be performed. I try to make the history of a work come alive for the dancers and also make it a fresh experience for them, so they can really “own” the work. When I am staging a dance, I have almost always been able to bring in either the choreographer, or someone who knew the choreographer well, to coach the dancers. I think that the dancers feel more connected to dance history from embodying the work. When you are literally in the choreography, you learn so much about the choreographer because it is their artistic/personal expression that you are embodying.

Nina Haft: Cal State University East Bay (2012)

MFA, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

My 30s: I left AXIS Dance Company after a great 10 year run. Kept dancing and choreographing my own work and committed more seriously to being an artist. I began teaching dance technique (including at Cal State East Bay), and that radically infused my own dancing and performing and choreography with new questions, energy. I started Nina Haft & Company when I was 37. The next year, I went back to graduate school. It was the only way I could think of to spend more time choreographing.

My 40s: Building my company, and realizing more fully what it means to commit to being an artist, have shaped this decade for me. I started making dances as a child, and am now coming full circle to embrace letting go of everything I know. This decade has seen my company grow to include national and international touring, including an ongoing Middle East choreography exchange. I am humbled though by how much each project can feel like starting from scratch. I want more than ever from dance, and am not sure how that’ll work out. I’ve been very lucky though so far, and so I keep at it.

Dana Lawton: Saint Mary's College of California (2012)

MFA, Mills College

What’s the key to being a dancer and balancing all of the hats you wear – as dancer, teacher, choreographer, and lifelong student?

Loving it beyond belief. That’s what keeps me going, even when I am tired, broke or feeling uninspired. I appreciate the different skill sets necessary for each discipline of dancing and how they innately complement each other as well. Also understanding the overall goal of each keeps me engaged. For example, to teach is to inspire and be creative so that students feel compelled to listen and learn. As a choreographer it is similar, but inspiration comes from a place of self-evaluation and desire to connect with my dancers and audience. As a dancer, these elements are also applicable, connection/investigation, but the work has to feed me as a human being by inquiring into who I am in the moment and how can I transcend beyond my limitations.

Jennifer Kayle: University of Iowa (2011)

MFA, Smith College

I focused on teaching as a way to also teach myself, to pay my bills, to create a home life, to be assured that I could survive and also do what I loved. But I’ve always enjoyed it! And I’ve been successful in conducting my creative research and performance simultaneous to teaching. I was drawn to teaching for practical reasons, but also for reasons of the heart.

Damon Rago

Damon Rago: Loyola Marymount University (2007)

MFA, University of Utah

Teaching Modern Dance at the collegiate level is all I’ve ever wanted to do.

The perks at my job:

-Full medical/dental and a great retirement plan

-Time to have coffee with students and friends

-A beautiful campus

-I LOVED college, and have never left it!

Jennifer Salk: University of Washington (2007)

MFA, Ohio State University

My 40s – I got my dream job at 40 in Seattle at the University of Washington and knew I had found home both geographically and in terms of my job. I continued to make a lot of dances, perform and work with wonderful dance artists, travel all over the world to make work and teach. I teach at a program with a ground breaking MFA program and a BA program. Our BA s often double and triple major so their lens is broad and they don’t live in a vacuum. I love my mentorship role and learn much from them everyday.

Jan Erkert: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2006)

BFA, University of Utah

Why write a book about teaching dance? Teaching has been the core of my career in dance….it is in my blood. I know teaching through the daily-ness of failures, successes, aha moments, and difficult students who occupy too much brain space. Selfishly, I wanted to start a conversation about teaching. I wanted us to question every assumption, honor and un-do histories and re-imagine how we might teach a person to dance. As a teacher, I struggled to figure out how to assist students in arriving at themselves without the tensions and habits I adopted and had to shed. I wondered if that was even possible. But perhaps if we could shine a light on our collective experiences, we could find new paths.

Andrea Olsen: Middlebury College (1988)

 MFA, University of Utah

When dancing, I love mixing things up: words and movement, science and art, you and I. 

I write to learn, I move to know. 

When finishing a book, I make a dance to see if what I said was true. 

Writing is a daily endeavor, just like dancing. It takes me ten years to complete a book. There’s the book I first imagine, the one that I write, and the edited and designed version that has its own life in the world—in someone’s hands, on someone’s shelf. Books travel to places you can’t go yourself—there’s a larger reach than performing.

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Related posts:

Continuing the Dialogue around MFA Programs in the United States

How many MFA programs are in the United States right now?

On chairing a dance department, part one

On chairing a dance department, part two

Blog Series: Masters Programs

Dancers with a PhD

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