Linda Kent earned her B.S. degree from the Juilliard School in 1968 and immediately
joined the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, with whom she toured internationally as
principal dancer, through 1974. In 1975 she joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company and
performed with them through 1989 in over 40 works of original creation and existing repertory.
Since 1977, Linda has restaged Taylor's works for ballet and modern dance companies
around the world, including the Joffrey Ballet, the Bat Dor Company of Israel, Les Grands Ballet
Canadiens, the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, La Scala Opera Ballet, State University of
New York-Purchase College, and the Juilliard School. She also stages works by Alvin Ailey and
David Parsons.
Linda has been on the faculty of the Juilliard School since 1984. She has taught at the
Taylor school since its inception in 1983, and at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, the
University of Illinois at Urbana, Wake Forest University, and the New York State Summer
School of the Arts, a Governors School. In 1992 Linda was the first modern dancer invited to
teach at the Bolshoi Ballet School in Moscow.
Linda's choreography has been performed in New York at the City Center Theater, the
Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, Castillo Cultural Center, the Riverside Church, and the
Union Theological Seminary where she is Artist-in-Residence.
She created a dance to The Lord's Prayer for Avodah's interfaith project. Linda and
JoAnne have collaborated on "The Stepping Into . . . ," an interfaith dance workshop with
accompanying performance. JoAnne and Linda co-authored an article on liturgical dance
published in December 1996 in Dance Magazine. Ms. Kent is a member of Avodah's Board of Directors.