Linda Szmyd Monich

Linda Szmyd Monich joined Boston Conservatory at Berklee in 2019 and is an associate professor of dance, teaching dance history.

Monich has been giving dance history lectures at the Boston Ballet School since 2017, and at Walnut Hill School’s ballet program since 2004. She has taught dance history at New Mexico School for the Arts, the National Dance Institute New Mexico, Manhattanville College, SUNY Purchase (guest lectures for the Master of Fine Arts in Dance program), Hofstra University, the Juilliard School, and Connecticut College. In addition to teaching dance history, Monich gave dance lectures for the Joyce Theater in New York from 1998 to 2015 about a range of contemporary dance companies and new choreography. She worked as a teaching artist in dance at Lincoln Center Institute, and was a consultant/teaching artist at New York City Ballet’s Education Department.

Monich has written articles for Dance Teacher Now, where she was a staff writer for four years, Ballet News, and Choreography & Dance, and wrote a book with Anne Reinking. She did the preliminary research for the Antony Tudor Archive Project at the Dance Notation Bureau. Monich has also worked in administrative positions for American Ballet Theatre, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Joffrey Ballet.

Monich received her B.A. in dance from the University of California at Irvine, where the faculty included Eugene Loring, Antony Tudor, and guest artists Bella Lewitsky and Clay Taliaferro. She received her M.A. from New York University in graduate drama (now performance studies). Her focus was on 20th-century dance history, and she wrote her thesis about Antony Tudor. In New York, she studied with May O’Donnell, Melissa Hayden, Ruth Currier, Louis Falco, and David Howard, among others.