Kennesaw State University is betting big on dance

Dr. Ivan Pulinkala arrived as a dance professor at Kennesaw State University in 2005 with a big job: Build the university a dance department. “We had theater, music, and the visual arts, [but] the missing component was dance,” says Pulinkala. He started with a dance minor, which drew 140 students by the second year. Next, he convinced the Board of Regents to add a dance major, and then, in 2012, an entire department. It’s since become the largest collegiate dance program in Georgia and highly regarded throughout the dance world.

Now, after years of concerted effort by Pulinkala and his colleagues, and thanks to a generous bequest by the late Robert (Bob) S. Geer, former vice president of the railway company Norfolk Southern, KSU’s arts departments will get a grand new home: an arts corridor at Chastain Pointe, adjacent to the original Kennesaw campus. The Geer family gift of $10 million will provide the university’s College of the Arts—comprising dance, theater, music, and visual arts—with seed funding to build a sweeping new set of buildings and artistic space over several years. “This will give us room to expand and grow,” says Pulinkala.

Pulinkala, now the university’s provost and executive vice president of academic affairs, believes the dance department’s success offers a preview of how further investment in the arts could cultivate distinctive excellence for the university. “A great university can be defined by many things; one of those is athletics, and another is the arts,” says Pulinkala.

The plans to develop Chastain Pointe date back to 2009, when the fast-growing dance department began hungering for more space. KSU had recently purchased the property, which was aptly referred to as “warehouse row” at the time. “So I went to the president and provost and said, ‘Give me one of those warehouses,’” Pulinkala recalls. “‘I promise you, we just need big, empty spaces.’”

Over the past decade, the dance department, along with the School of Art and Design’s painting and drawing and printmaking programs, have relocated to a renovated portion of the Chastain Pointe complex. But Geer’s gift makes it possible to bring into reality the full vision: an arts corridor with about 200,000 square feet of space, enough to house all four schools of the College of the Arts, along with outdoor performance venues, green space, and modern studios and classrooms.

Though that full facility is still underway, KSU’s investment in its dance department is already paying dividends. The new Chastain Pointe home includes studios with sprung floors and Marley dance surfaces, and costume and set shops. The 435-seat KSU Dance Theater, located nearby on the Marietta campus, was designed specifically for dance performance.

Marsha Barsky, current chair of the dance department, says the upgraded facilities have had an immediate effect on students: “You can literally see the expansion in their bodies,” she says. “Having this much space transforms the way they move.”

It has also transformed the program. Home to the competitive Eleo Pomare–Glenn Connor Summer Choreographic Residency, the department has achieved national and regional recognition, having been selected several times to perform at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, one of few college dance programs to receive the honor. The company frequently performs at events held by the American College Dance Association and hosts an annual high-school dance festival for aspiring young dancers.

Bringing together the entire College of the Arts—renamed the Robert S. Geer Family College of the Arts in honor of Geer’s contribution—is more than just a practical vision. Autumn Eckman, assistant professor of dance, believes the physical proximity between arts disciplines will facilitate creative connections among students.

“Interdisciplinary collaboration is already happening,” she says. Gathering the four schools together “will physically open the door to new possibilities for students.”

This article appears in our February 2025 issue.