Administrator.
Alexandra Cook is an arts administrator, dance educator, choreographer, and performer originally from Rhode Island and now based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the Youth and Family Programs Director and a Teaching Artist for Mark Morris Dance Group, where she has been a member of the Education and Community Engagement team since 2017.
Alex began her dance training as a toddler, studying in the Vaganova curriculum of classical ballet, first under Arlene Golden Gilbert at the Jasper School of Dance and then under Mrs. Herci Marsden at Brae Crest School of Ballet, home of the State Ballet of RI. At 13, she auditioned successfully for the Director’s Scholarship and began performing as a company member with the State Ballet.
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Educator.
Maker.
Upon graduating from high school, Alex attended Denison University, double majoring in Dance and Economics. While there, she studied in the Cecchetti, RAD, and Balanchine syllabi of ballet (Mishele Mennett, Julie Fox, and Maria Cynthia Anderson, respectively), post-modern and contemporary forms (Sandra Mathern-Smith, Keith Thompson, and Molly Shanahan), and Dances of the African Diaspora (Stafford C. Berry Jr.), achieving advanced levels in each. She also pursued advanced coursework in composition and pedagogy (Gill Wright Miller, PhD). During her time in school, Alex auditioned successfully twice for the Vail Arts Scholarship. Her Economics work focused on theories of economic growth in the developing world and the study of income inequality. Alex combined these interests to develop her Senior Research Thesis Project, a dance work entitled Y Us? examining the socio-political development of the millenial generation.
Post-graduation, Alex returned to RI and began performing with Fusionworks Modern Dance Company under the Artistic Direction of Deb Meunier. During this time, she performed the works of Meunier, Mark Harootian, Terry Creach, Stephanie Stanford-Shaw and more. She also created and premiered a work on Fusionworks II and worked as a Teaching Artist in public schools for the company. In addition to her work for Fusionworks, Alex served as faculty for the Festival Ballet Providence School, Providence Country Day School, Fusionworks Academy and the Jasper School of Dance, where she also did part-time administrative work.
In August of 2012, Alex relocated to Incheon, South Korea to found the dance department at Chadwick International. She was responsible for writing and implementing the dance curriculum for all students in the school, Pre-K through Grade 12. During this time, Alex obtained her certification in the International Baccalaureate curriculum at both the Primary Years Programme and Middle Years Programme levels. Additionally, she completed coursework in Teaching English Language Learners in the Mainstream Classroom and presented at the KORCOS education conference. She also continued to develop her personal choreographic work, premiering pieces in Incheon and at the idance festival in Hong Kong.
Returning to the United States in July of 2015, Alex worked freelance in the Washington, D.C. area. She was the beginning and intermediate/advanced ballet teacher for the boarding school Mercersburg Academy, as well as teaching advanced level modern dance for the Shenandoah Conservatory Arts Academy. Alex also performed with modern dance troupe ACW Dances and worked as an administrator on the programs team for dance service organization, Dance/USA. In 2016, she taught Speaking and Listening through Drama for Mercersburg Academy’s English Language Learner summer program.
In May of 2016, shortly before relocating to NYC, Alex completed a choreography mentorship with Doug Varone through his DEVICES program whereby her work was shown at Gibney. Upon moving to the city, she began teaching for Brooklyn Arts Exchange and established WorkHorse Dance Project, a project based company of which she was Artistic Director until March of 2020. Under that title, her work has been presented by Dixon Place, SharedSpace at the Mark Morris Dance Center, Center for Performance Research NYC, Triskelion Arts WAXworks, the Women's Choreography Project (RI), and at multiple schools in the Northeastern United States.
In 2017, she began working for Mark Morris Dance Group as its Community Education Programs Manager, coordinating program partnerships with public and private schools, service organizations, and non-profits throughout the boroughs of NYC. Promoted to Community Programs Director in February 2019, the amount of partnerships doubled in size under Alex’s stewardship. In 2020, she was promoted to Youth and Family Programs Director, overseeing all programs, curriculum development, faculty, and professional development as related to The School at the Mark Morris Dance Center and the Community Education programs. She also serves on the Land Acknowledgment committee as part of MMDG’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (I.D.E.A.) work. She has represented the organization nationally at conferences for the Arts In Education Roundtable, Dance/NYC, the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) and the International Association of Blacks in Dance.
In addition, Alex provides freelance support to Falcon Dance.Brit Falcon as its Company manager and is a member of NDEO, the NYC Arts in Education Roundtable, and Dance/USA. She has training in both choral and solo singing, having studied privately with Stephanie Henkle. A favorite professional performance credit is her time gigging at music venues in South Korea. Alex speaks French at the intermediate level, does very well in Korean as long as she's in a restaurant or a taxi, and recently started taking Spanish lessons. Finally, her writing on dance education topics has been published by Dance Magazine and Dance Ed Tips.
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