Judith Jamison (1943-2024)
Filed under the name Judith · March 29, 2026
Judith Jamison led the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for over two decades, expanding its reach well beyond where it started, and I think about leadership like that a fair amount, having run my own rig as an owner-operator for years now — the difference between being good at the actual work yourself and being good at building something that keeps growing after you've handed off pieces of it to other people. She apparently did both, first as a celebrated dancer herself and then as the one steering the whole institution for decades. I've driven through more small towns with old dance schools or community theaters clinging on than you'd expect, places somebody like her probably never visited but whose whole approach to keeping an art form alive trickled down anyway. Two decades of steady leadership is a long freight run in any field, and not many people manage to keep something moving forward that long without losing the thing that made it worth building in the first place.