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Brian McGinnis began dancing at the age of seven with Jo Ann Warren in Worcester, Massachusetts. His early childhood was spent tap dancing on linoleum floors at local nursing homes, hospitals, and the nearby shopping malls of the community he grew up in. Eventually, during his summers as a teenager, he performed at Busch Gardens Williamsburg and Walt Disney World, and in the winters he toured with a local ballet company, perfecting each role, from a party-boy to the main squeeze in the Nutcracker. He graduated from the Juilliard School with a BFA in Dance, under the directorship of Benjamin Harkarvy, and thereafter New York City became his home.
Brian immersed himself for many faithful years in the companies of Lar Lubovitch, Elisa Monte, David Parsons and Jacqueline Buglisi, and had the opportunity to perform at Jacob’s Pillow, Lincoln Center, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Bolshoi Theatre, American Dance Festival, the Joyce Theatre, NYC City Center, the Kennedy Center, Millennium Park, the Shubert Theatre, and the Spoleto Festival, Italy. During those informative years, he also learned to self-produce workshops, masterclasses, and performance residencies, gaining more perspective on dance, and how it affected him pedagogically. This led him to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he earned his MFA in Dance. He has also lived in Chicago for a year, touring with Hubbard Street Dance, and then again more recently for five years, while he was on faculty at ChiArts, Chicago’s Public Performing Arts High School, and Visceral Dance Center in the heart of the windy city.
In 2017 he joined Boston Conservatory at Berklee as an associate professor, where he now teaches Junior Dance Composition, Freshman Dance Composition, Senior Modern Technique, and Senior Seminar. This semester, his classes are collaborating and presenting a performance with the Music Composition Department at Berklee, and he will be directing rehearsals for choreographers Roderick George and Itzik Galili for the conservatories main stage productions. Working alongside composer Pedro Osuna Ardoy and visual artist Fotini Christophillis, together they will present Poetic Spaces, an evening-length performance in the fall of 2018. This past year, he was the recipient of the student-nominated Best of Berklee Award, received a Faculty Travel Grant, and a Faculty Development Fellowship from Berklee College to conduct pedagogical research in Israel for a movement method in developmental practice. Brian also holds an Associate Degree in Occupational Science for Massage Therapy from the Swedish Institute in NYC, and is a Massachusetts state licensed massage therapist.
You can watch Brian discuss his profession on YouTube.