Kevin M. Kane, Ph.D., M.F.A.
Knowing how essential the arts were to his own personal development and education, Kevin has dedicated his career to making ensemble dance and theatre pieces that are dynamic, truthful, socially relevant, and always, in some key way, hopeful. This work has entailed making artistic and creative opportunities available and accessible to youth of all backgrounds. His main interest in both his scholarly and creative work is nurturing and mentoring youth in the arts, helping to empower students, educators, and communities through progressive, inclusive, and interdisciplinary arts practices.
A long-time Los Angeles resident and member of the UCLA Arts community, Kevin is currently the Associate Director of UCLA Visual and Performing Arts Education program (VAPAE) and Adjunct Assistant Professor in World Arts and Cultures/ Dance and Arts Education. Kevin has also worked extensively as a high school and university dance, theatre arts, movement, and arts education pedagogy instructor. In addition, Kevin co-founded a non-profit arts organization, while also continuing his work as a dance-theater and film director, screenwriter, program director, interdisciplinary arts curriculum designer, cultural studies and performance studies scholar, and arts education researcher, advocate, and author.
Born and raised in a working class neighborhood of Philadelphia, Kevin is a first generation artist and college graduate. He began his own dance and theater training as a 14-year old, fortunate to receive a ballet scholarship. This “Billy Elliot-type” opportunity led to many more experiences in the arts, most often benefitting from scholarship awards in order to participate. He went on to attend Hofstra University in New York and earned a B.F.A. degree in Theatre Arts, with minors in English and Dance, graduating with honors. After his graduation, he spent several years working as a professional performer, traveling extensively as a dancer, actor, singer, director, choreographer, writer, and filmmaker. Among his favorite acting roles was Bobby and Mark in several companies of A Chorus Line, Lucky in Waiting for Godot, and Claude in the European tour of Hair. At that time, Kevin also founded and served as Artistic Director of a New York City based acting collective called Actor’s Initiative.
Later as a Los Angeles resident, Kevin transitioned to teaching and discovered his true passion by becoming a committed cultural worker, youth mentor, and community arts activist. He spent eight years as a credentialed performing arts teacher at John Marshall High School, a Los Angeles Unified Public High School, where he developed a multidisciplinary dance, theater, and music program that utilized a variety of strategies for developing original ensemble performance pieces in collaboration with his students. This program, called Theatre Workshop, was not only extraordinarily popular with its students and the school community but also proved to be a pivotal career experience. Marshall’s Theatre Workshop program informed and inspired Kevin’s progressive philosophies and inclusive practices in the arts and set in motion his various strategies for redirecting youth through the arts.
Kevin also holds a MFA in dance choreography from UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/ Dance (WAC/D), where he specialized in creating original dance theater productions with large youth ensembles. Upon completion of his graduate studies, he joined the faculty at WAC/D as an adjunct professor and lecturer, and created and directed the UCLA Summer High School Dance Theater Intensive program. Since 2006, this program has brought together a diverse group of youth artists from all over the nation for nine days of dance and theater training, creative collaboration, and meaningful explorations of personal identity, human relations, and the role of artists in society. The program has committed itself to helping all students with their transitions from high school into college, and guiding them as they imagine how the arts might play a part in their futures.
In 2012, Kevin earned his Ph.D. degree in Cultural Studies (with an emphasis in Arts Education and Culture & Performance) from Claremont Graduate University. His doctoral thesis, “Transforming Teens: Access and Diversity, Identity Exploration, Creative Collaboration, and Community-Building in a Progressive Performing Arts Program for Youth,” puts forth his substantial research in arts education, summer arts immersion programs and afterschool arts programs, and his own theories and methods for “progressive performing arts” programs for youth. Kevin’s approach to youth work in the arts entails training students in dance, theater, and performance, and by offering a unique combination of diversity, human relations activities, and social/ creative collaborations, help to initiate substantial perspective and creative transformations in student participants.
Kevin has published several articles describing his progressive and inclusive dance, movement, and theatre arts pedagogies and methodologies. His article, “Best Practices in the Performing Arts: Transformation and Flourishing in a Progressive Summer Dance Theater Program for Adolescents”, is a comprehensive description of his progressive multidisciplinary performing arts pedagogies, has been accepted to be published in the Journal of Dance Education, Special Best Practices in Teaching Edition, 2013. Likewise, in an article entitled “Transformative Performing Arts and Mentorship Pedagogy: Nurturing Developmental Relationships in a Multidisciplinary Dance Theatre Program for Youth,” published in the Journal of Training Studies (JETS) in 2014, Kevin describes how progressive dance sites are ideal locations for meaningful mentorship relationships to take hold.
Since attending and teaching at UCLA, Kevin has continued his own dance and movement training in Los Angeles, studying with such teachers as Simone Forti, Taisha Paggett, Sara Wookey, and Liz Casebolt & Joel Smith. Kevin has also practiced yoga with Shiva Rea, Susan Priver, Hannah House Gilan, and several other local teachers; attended an extended tango dance intensive in Buenos Aires; studied rhythm tap with Lynn Dally, Contact Improvisation with Shel Wagner-Rasch, and choreography with Carmela Hermann, Victoria Marks, Cheng-Chieh Yu, and David Roussève. In addition, he has continued his studies in ballet with Los Angeles instructor Cati Jean and contemporary dance with Jasmine Albuquerque Croissant, as well as participating in social dance, country-western, hip-hop, and salsa forms with several LA-area teachers and groups. Kevin has also participated in workshops with Ben Wright from London's Moving Pictures dance group and Japanese Butoh with Katsura Kan. Kevin currently studies the Gaga Improvisational Movement technique from Danielle Agami and the ATE9 dance company and explores movement with Oguri and Body Weather Laboratory.
Kevin had the pleasure to choreograph for the acclaimed series “Everybody Loves Raymond”, and has continued to train in acting and scene study, more recently taking on the role of John Wayne in Marianne Kim’s “Making a Disaster” at Highways Performance Space and making numerous television and film appearances, including Disney’s “Crazy/ Beautiful” and Warner Brother’s “E.R.”
Still, Kevin’s main focus in his life and career is to advocate for and work on behalf of youth and communities through the arts. He is exceptionally proud to be the co-founder of The Flourish Foundation, a non-profit arts organization for which he served as the Executive Director from 2006-2014. The Flourish mission is to empower middle, high school, and college aged students through arts education by offering an assortment of arts-based projects and programs that promote self-esteem, creativity, community connections, and academic proficiency. By offering scholarships for students to train and grants to community organizations and school-sites to develop and present youth-oriented arts programs, Flourish has uses a broad range of strategies help local adolescents discover many pathways towards stable and productive futures.
With this mission in mind, Kevin currently teaches Arts Education and Socially Engaged Arts pedagogy classes in the UCLA Visual and Performing Arts Education Minor (VAPAE) program. In the VAPAE Program, Kevin has the good fortune to regularly work with and mentor the next generation of artist educators, designing and implementing afterschool arts programs, community-based arts workshops, and an ambitious public event series that brings together thought leaders in the arts and arts education.
Finally, throughout the few years, Kevin has been inspired to travel, study, teach, create, collaborate, conduct research, attend artist residencies, and make friends in such countries as Finland, Ireland, Canada, Ghana, China, Tibet, Hong Kong, South Africa, Thailand, Cambodia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Laos, Japan, and Costa Rica.
The arts have given Kevin an incredible life full of rich and wondrous discoveries, connections, and memories…and the journey goes on.