Kevin Kane

Originally from Philadelphia, Kevin began his early dance training as a scholarship student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Ballet, at the age of fourteen. He is a graduate of the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts, and New York’s Hofstra University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Theatre Arts and Dance. Early professional performance credits include: Hair, A Chorus Line, Evita, Babes In Toyland, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Stampede, Horseshoe, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Guys and Dolls and Measure for Measure and several music videos. Kevin also worked early as a director and choreographer. These credits include many works done through Actor’s Initiative, a professional acting company based in New York City, which Kevin founded along with his best college friends after graduation. Also as a beginning director/choreographer: Savage/Love, Grease, Joseph... Dreamcoat, Dames At Sea, and Something’s Afoot.

As an early resident of Los Angeles, Kevin attended the cinema program at Los Angeles City College, worked with The Actor’s Gang, appeared in the West Coast premiere of On Tina Tuna Walk, wrote and directed infomercials and promotional videos for Japan’s/The Dentsu Agency, choreographed for the Ballet Folklorico del Pacifico, and directed the acclaimed stage production Northern Lights, at Hollywood’s Egyptian Arena Theater. Kevin’s screenplay (co-screenwriter) for the television version of Northern Lights premiered on the Disney Channel in August 1997. Diane Keaton and Maury Chaykin headed the cast with Diane Keaton’s Blue Relief Productions and Meg Ryan’s Prufrock Pictures serving as executive producers. In addition, he also became a published author when his short story "Piccadilly" appeared in the literary magazine "The Evergreen Chronicles".

In 1994, Kevin began teaching English, theatre and dance at John Marshall High School, located in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. At Marshall, Kevin helped develop and became chair of a new Performing Arts Department. With his Theatre Workshop program, he created (directed, choreographed and co-wrote) the following original theatre pieces, best described as autobiographical dance theatre: Any Dream Will Do, Sweet Fantasy, Welcome 2 the World, Coming Home, I Got Life, a family thing, Come A Long Way, In My Life, PASTforward and A Full Circle. When the Theatre Workshop class was first formed in 1995, there were only a dozen students enrolled. By the spring semester of 2001, there were approximately 150 students enrolled in three sections (with a lengthy waiting list for each semester’s enrollment), and its final major production was presented to enthusiastic sold-out audiences.

As a teacher, Kevin has been the recipient of several honors and awards: In 1996, he was awarded the Golden Apple award, as Los Angeles Unified School District’s outstanding new English teacher of the year. In 1999, Kevin was announced as a Bravo Award Finalist as Southern California’s outstanding arts educator of the year, and in 1999, 2000, and 2001, he was the recipient of a Who’s Who Among American High School award. His work as a performing arts teacher has also been covered in an LA Times feature story, as well as in segments for CNN Headline News and National Public Radio’s "Morning Edition". Kevin, along with five of his students, also found himself performing a supporting role in the Touchstone film, crazy/beautiful.

In 2003, Kevin completed his Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance Choreography at UCLA's Dept. of World Arts and Cultures. While a WAC graduate student, he was awarded the GOFP Fellowship in Dance, the Frances Nulsen, the Philip and Aida Siff Educational Foundation, the Elaine Krown Klein, the Maddie Katz, and the Jean Irwin Scholarships, and in September 2002, he received a UCIRA grant which helped fund FLY — a Theatre Workshop Alumni show, featuring 45 of the program's best and brightest, presented for both community and Marshall audiences. Since completing his graduate studies, he has been on faculty at WAC as a lecturer teaching performance arts and directing ensemble dance theater productions. In 2002, Kevin restarted the Repertory Tour Ensemble program class at WAC, and has remained at the helm of the program through 2006. Working with undergrads and community college students, he has developed five full-length collaborative dance theater productions, mixing a variety of dance and musical forms, autobiographical text and spoken word, abstract narratives, video, gestures, as well as more traditional monologues, dialogues, and scene work -- all revolving around such relevant social themes as homelessness and displacement, conflict and war, identity, immigration, and inter-culturalism. The Rep Tour shows have toured various Los Angeles area high schools and have performed for many more high school and middle school audiences at WAC, as well are regularly presented for UCLA and community audiences. His WAC Rep Tour shows: Never Only Here, Lost and Found, Stand, Throwing Stones and Shelter. In 2002, 2003 and 2004, he was the recipient of the Who's Who Among American College and University Teachers award - nominated anonymously by former students.

Since attending and teaching at UCLA, Kevin has continued his own dance training: studying yoga with Shiva Rea and several other area teachers, rhythm tap with Lynn Dally, Contact Improvisation with Shel Wagner- Rasch, and choreography with Carmela Hermann, Victoria Marks, Cheng-Chieh Yu and David Rousseve. In addition, he has recently studied Afro-Cuban and Ghanaian dance, martial arts, circus and aerial fabrics training, and has work-shopped with Ben Wright from London's Moving Pictures dance group. In addition, he appeared as “John Wayne” in dance/video/performance artist Marianne Kim’s recent inter-disciplinary work Making A Disaster at Highways Performance Space. At WAC, Kevin also studied closely with such teacher/mentors as Peter Sellars and David Gere.

Other recent projects include small acting roles on network television's ER and Yes, Dear, as well as working as a choreographer on such television shows as Everybody Loves Raymond, The Jeff Garlin Program, and The District. For several years, Kevin has enjoyed leading experiential workshops around the LA area (for the Los Angeles Unified School District among other organizations, and at such studios and theater groups as the Debbie Allen Studios, The UCLA Fowler Museum, and The Actor's Gang) for teachers and students alike, presenting his concepts of creating original dance theatre productions. Most recently Kevin was lucky to participate in an international residency at the University of Ghana, Dance Department (October 2006) and in Winter 2007 joined the faculty of The Atlantic Theater Company (NYU) and The Atlantic Acting School teaching movement and dance theater techniques to its advanced acting students. Also, in summer 2006, headed the first annual UCLA Summer High School Dance Theater Intensive, bringing together forty high school students from all over the country to train in various dance and art forms and rehearse and perform an original dance theater production entitled Saying Our PEACE. Kevin is scheduled to direct the 2007 summers program as well.

Kevin’s most recent theater assignment was creating and directing Flesh and Blood, a dance theater piece exploring issues of HIV/AIDS for the WAC Make Art/STOP AIDS Initiative, which was performed throughout the winter of 2007 for high school and community audiences. The piece was meant to bring a cultural and historical perspective to the AIDS pandemic 25 years after the first diagnosis in the US, and it prominently featured The Keiskamma Altarpiece in loan from Hamburg, South Africa ( a town where Kevin had to good fortune to visit and conduct project research in Fall 2006). In addition, Kevin has adapted both the Throwing Stones and Shelter theater projects into short dance on film works. The Throwing Stones film was accepted and viewed at the Vistas Film Festival in June 2006 and has been used as a classroom/curricular tool for middle school and high school teachers addressing such issues as conflict resolution, schoolyard bullying, a peaceful planet, and the war in Iraq with their students.

Finally, since 2005, Kevin has been working as the Executive Director for The Flourish Foundation (under founder and friend, Monica Rosenthal), a philanthropy group dedicated to supporting arts and educational programs and projects in the Los Angeles area. The scope of the foundation’s work includes: providing scholarships to high school, undergraduate, and graduate students pursuing training and careers in the arts, education, and social justice realms, awarding grants and funding to LA area community artists and groups, providing training and teaching assignments to a new generation of community based arts instructors, and working with various middle and high schools to support and supplement their arts curriculum and programming.

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