Kara Medoff Barnett, who has held the post for the last five and a half years, will leave later this year.
American Ballet Theater was already looking for new leadership, with Kevin McKenzie, its artistic director of nearly three decades, planning to leave in 2022. Now, it must find new administrative leadership as well: Kara Medoff Barnett, its executive director, announced on Monday that she would be stepping down later this year.
Barnett will be leaving to lead social impact marketing and strategy at First Republic Bank and develop the recently established First Republic Foundation. She will start in mid-September but will continue to advise Ballet Theater part-time through the end of the year while its board searches for her successor. She will also serve on two Ballet Theater advisory groups.
A dancer since she was 3 and a graduate of Harvard Business School, Barnett joined Ballet Theater in 2016, after working for almost nine years as a senior executive at Lincoln Center.
“She’s got this ability to access joy, even when you’re having to make difficult decisions,” McKenzie said in an interview. “It’s one thing to be an empathetic or an inspirational leader, but it’s another thing to instill a sense of purpose and joy.”
The pandemic, Barnett said, has been an inflection point for everyone, including herself: Her new job will be her first in the world of finance, and her first role in a public company.
“I don’t think that I could have even contemplated moving on if A.B.T. were in a different place,” Barnett said, adding that the company was on “a positive trajectory, even after the year of upheaval that we’ve had.”
When Barnett joined the company, it was still recovering from the economic downturn. Although Covid-19 has posed new financial challenges, Barnett said that Ballet Theater had managed to broaden its
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.