Krisha Marcano's Goals for Conservatory's Theater Division: Refine, Level Up, Focus

When she was four years old, Krisha Marcano saw a ballerina for the very first time while watching The Nutcracker on television at her home in Trinidad, and she instantly knew she was going to be a professional dancer. To be clear, she didn’t merely think she wanted to be one; she was certain it would happen for her someday. She begged to take ballet lessons, and when her grandmother said no (because lessons were too expensive), she pitched an epic tantrum that became a chapter in Marcano family lore.

“Apparently, I threw myself all over the living room,” says Marcano, who became Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s new dean of theater in July. She simply would not take “no” for an answer. “I don’t know what you all need to do, but I’m going to thrash around until you get it together,” she recalls thinking at the time. 

Her grandmother relented, and Marcano received excellent ballet training in Trinidad until she finished high school. After graduation, there were no signposts pointing her in the direction of “professional dancer,” and no mentors explaining how to navigate the US educational system. Nevertheless, Marcano knew where she wanted to go next.

“I watched her grow from an excited and eager young artist into a commanding presence on the stage, with her natural comedic talent, beautiful voice.”

— LaChanze

“I was born in New York and my mother was still living in New York, so I knew that once I finished high school that’s where I was going—because that’s where I was going to be dancing,” she says. 

Marcano had heard of the city’s most prominent dance program, at Juilliard, but had no idea how to apply; however, she did figure out how to enroll in a modern dance class at nearby Queensborough Community College. With 14 years of ballet training under her belt, she was head and shoulders above her less-experienced classmates. “The teacher looked at me and said, ‘What are you doing here? Come to my office right after class.’ My first class!” Marcano says. 

The teacher at Queensborough helped Marcano secure an audition for the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College and told her how to take the train to the school’s campus in Westchester County. When Marcano was accepted as an undergraduate, she told her mother, “I got into a conservatory training program. It’s at SUNY Purchase. I don’t know anything about any of those things, but we’re gonna figure it out.” 

With this kind of spunk, Marcano was able to carve her own path forward, from SUNY Purchase to two of the most prestigious dance companies in the US, then on to Broadway, and eventually to faculty and staff positions in higher education. She brings a rare breadth of experience to her latest role as dean as well as a contagious energy that is revitalizing the Theater Division.

It was the choreography of Martha Graham that first opened Marcano’s eyes to the possibilities of both modern dance and acting. Her studies at SUNY Purchase focused on Graham technique, introducing her to a dance vocabulary—and means of self-expression—unlike anything she had experienced before. “For the first time, I found the ability to sing through my body. There was something godlike, euphoric, about doing that in class,” she says. 

About a year after graduating from SUNY Purchase, Marcano was hired by the Martha Graham Dance Company as the only woman of color in the troupe. Performing Graham’s work was a formative experience for Marcano, who saw herself reflected in its impassioned storytelling. “Her actual choreography—the work that we got to do—formed who I was as a woman,” she says. “I got to realize that I don’t have to be pretty. I can be destructive. I can give life, and I can take it …. That just peeled an onion layer for me, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s more.’”

Working with the Graham company also tapped into Marcano’s theatricality and “just blew the walls off,” she says. For the first time, she felt like an actor as well as a dancer. After two years with the Graham company, she moved on to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for two more, and then made the leap to musical theater as a dancer in the first national tour of Fosse. Marcano toured the world with that show, from 1999 to 2001, then joined the cast of Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida as a swing. She covered nine different ensemble roles for that production—learning lines, stage positions, dance steps, and vocal parts for each one and filling in for castmates at a moment’s notice.  

She remained with Aida for its entire Broadway run, from 2001 to 2004; as the production neared its end, she became its dance captain, running rehearsals for the company, ensuring quality control, and teaching choreography to new company members. Her job as dance captain was Marcano’s first taste of teaching, and she found that what made her a great performer also made her an effective instructor: noticing the details, learning from missteps, and trying to make the show a little better each time. 

With each step forward in her performance career, Marcano learned an entirely new set of performance skills. By the time Aida closed, she had distinguished herself as a dancer and ensemble cast member, and she’d become an accomplished singer. Finding new modalities of expression has kept her highly employable, she says; and integrating those modalities has made her a better artist.

“When I say that with Graham I found that I could sing through my body, I only [arrived at] that sentence by becoming a singer,” she says. “I realized that when I was dropped in and doing it well, that was how dance made me feel.” 

For Marcano, the next logical step was to audition for principal acting parts. She quickly found one, originating the role of Squeak in The Color Purple at its Atlanta world premiere in 2004 and then on Broadway from 2005 to 2008. Her costar LaChanze (a 2024 Boston Conservatory honorary degree recipient) played Celie and says it was gratifying to see Marcano take on a principal role for the first time.

“I watched her grow from an excited and eager young artist into a commanding presence on the stage, with her natural comedic talent, beautiful voice—and how she did it all with ease, even though it was anything but easy,” says LaChanze. 

For her part, Marcano says that working with LaChanze was one of the best educational experiences of her life. “Being a principal, all eyes are on you for a different level of telling the story. I remember in rehearsal, looking at LaChanze and learning. Like, if they offered that for a workshop, I couldn’t afford to pay for it.”

As she branched out into a career as an educator, Marcano taught summer programs at Dance Theatre of Harlem and Joffrey Ballet School, and later worked as an adjunct professor at New York University. In 2016, she joined the faculty at University of North Carolina School of the Arts, developing the drama program’s musical theater dance curriculum. Now leading the Theater Division at Boston Conservatory, Marcano says she has three primary goals for the division in mind—and they sound a lot like what got her this far in the first place.

“Refining. Leveling up. Focus,” she says.