Jacob's Pillow Welcomes Kim Chan As Associate Artistic Director

Kim Chan will join Jacob’s Pillow's curatorial and leadership team as Associate Artistic Director, an enhanced full-time staff position that begins January 22. In this role, Chan will oversee several administrative departments at the organization, with a program portfolio encompassing archives and preservation, audience engagement, community engagement, in-person performances, artist residencies, and The School at Jacob’s Pillow.

Chan will also serve on the curatorial team at Jacob’s Pillow, identifying artists to perform at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival (which will celebrate its 92nd season in summer 2024) and to participate in the Pillow Lab year-round residency program. With Chan, the curatorial team is composed of Jacob’s Pillow Executive and Artistic Director Pamela Tatge (since 2016), Associate Curator Melanie George (since 2020), and International Advisor Cathy Levy (since 2022), and is supported by Producing Director Holly Jones.

Additionally, the Associate Artistic Director position will be responsible for integrating Jacob’s Pillow’s programming areas operationally and strategically with an eye to achieving the organization’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) goals. Over the next five years, Chan and Tatge will also collaborate on facilitating a deeper digital integration of Jacob’s Pillow’s programming areas.

“We are greatly looking forward to welcoming Kim into our growing year-round staff, and I am excited to work closely together as we set the strategic direction of programming at the Pillow,” said Tatge. “The Pillow’s Associate Artistic Director will be a strong partner to colleagues in the field, bringing progressive ideas back to the team, and challenging the organization to innovate and remain relevant in a changing world. Kim’s strengths, wide-ranging expertise, and her overall compassion and intelligence make her an excellent fit for this role.”

Chan said she is “thrilled and honored” to contribute to Jacob’s Pillow’s legacy in partnership with the Pillow staff and curatorial team. “Dance is a lifelong passion,” she said, “and Jacob’s Pillow has fed that passion throughout my career. I am also excited to participate in the leadership that the dance field brings to today’s cultural sector, and how the Pillow can further its mission by establishing and nurturing coalitions with artists and peers to shape our collective futures with equity, strength, and creativity.”

 

ABOUT Kim Chan

Kim Chan has worked extensively in New York City and Washington, D.C. as a producer, curator, presenter, marketer, and fundraiser of poetry, music, theater, dance, arts education, and literature. She is a board member for the MAP Fund, Mid-Atlantic Arts, Ping Chong + Company, and Pick-Up Performance Co(s). She has also served on the New York Dance and Performance “Bessies” Award Committee, on the boards for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP), Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s La Pocha Nostra, and Dance Place, on the advisory board at GALA Hispanic Theatre, and as a National Dance Project Hub Site.

Chan is the recipient of the Workforce Development Mentor of the Year Award from the National Independent Venue Foundation for her work at National Sawdust, the music incubator in Brooklyn; the Pola Nirenska Lifetime Achievement in Dance  Award from Washington Performing Arts; and Outstanding Service Awards from the International Association of Blacks in Dance and the Chen Dance Center. Chan is also one of the volunteers with Make Us Visible NJ who helped organize advocacy efforts that made New Jersey the second state in the country to pass legislation requiring Asian American Pacific Island Studies be taught in K-12 school curriculums as a long-term approach to counter anti-Asian racism.

 

ABOUT JACOB’S PILLOW

Jacob’s Pillow is a National Historic Landmark, recipient of the National Medal of Arts, and home to America's longest-running international dance festival, which will celebrate its 92nd season in Summer 2024. Jacob’s Pillow acknowledges that it rests on the ancestral homelands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok or Mohican people. We pay honor and respect to their ancestors and elders past and present as we commit to building a more inclusive and equitable space for all. In addition, we acknowledge the Nipmuc, the Wampanoag and other tribal nations who also made their homes in what is now known as Massachusetts. 

Each Festival includes national and international dance companies and free and ticketed performances, talks, tours, classes, exhibits, events, and community programs. The School at Jacob’s Pillow, a prestigious professional dance training center, advances the careers of the upcoming generation of performers and choreographers; during the Festival, 100 international dancers evolve as artists in ballet, choreography, contemporary, musical theatre, tap, and other genres, and year round, artist faculty and accomplished alumni nurture younger dancers in a series of Jacob’s Pillow 360 workshops and intensives offered in partnership with leading dance institutions worldwide. The Pillow also provides professional advancement opportunities across disciplines of arts administration, design, video, and production through seasonal internships and a year-round Administrative Fellows program. Through its community engagement programs, the Pillow serves as a partner and active citizen in its local community. The Pillow’s extensive Archives, open year-round to the public and online at danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org, chronicle more than a century of dance in photographs, programs, books, costumes, audiotapes, and videos.

Notable artists who have created or premiered dances at the Pillow include choreographers Antony Tudor, Agnes De Mille, Alvin Ailey, Donald McKayle, Kevin Mckenzie, Twyla Tharp, Ralph Lemon, Susan Marshall, Trisha Brown, Ronald K. Brown, Wally Cardona, Andrea Miller, and Trey McIntyre; performed by artists such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Carmen De Lavallade, Mark Morris, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Edward Villella, Rasta Thomas, and hundreds of others. On March 2, 2011, President Barack Obama honored Jacob’s Pillow with a National Medal of Arts, the highest arts award given by the United States Government, making the Pillow the first dance presenting organization to receive this prestigious award. The Pillow’s Executive and Artistic Director since 2016 is Pamela Tatge. For more information, visit www.jacobspillow.org. 

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