Behind the Scenes: Interview with Dean Allyson Green, Tisch School of the Arts

Do you know what Lady Gaga, Martin Scorsese, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Bell, and Lisa Edelstein have in common? Despite their vastly different careers, all got their start at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Frequently recognized for its excellence and its long list of notorious alumni, the school has been in the top ranks of art schools in the U.S. for decades. Dean Green agreed to answer a few of our questions in this interview about her career path and her day-to-day job as dean of Tisch.

© EVG Media

“Looking back now, I think that everything in my life prepared me for a job that I didn’t know I wanted and would end up loving.”

Allyson graduated from Washington University in Saint Louis with a bachelor’s in fine arts, and from the University of Wisconsin with an MFA in choreography. Right out of school, she worked in public television as a designer and assistant producer of an art show. Wanting to dance, she found her way in Saint Louis, then San Francisco, and finally in New York. “Everybody has to arrive in New York,” she says. “I was right to follow my instinct.” Living in a walk-up apartment in the East Village, she pursued her dance career by performing and choreographing while supporting herself through her freelance design business. “Years later, I’ve come to see that the design thinking was a real part of what I do.”

Allyson traveled the world for her work. She was sent to Eastern Europe by the U.S. Embassy to perform and teach during the 80s and 90s. There, she saw artists who were creating change like Václav Havel, who became President of the Czech Republic, and she saw historical scenes of revolution like the fall of the Berlin Wall. But her most impactful experience back then was the AIDS epidemic. “It was an extraordinarily hard time, both in New York and San Francisco. I lost far too many friends who I loved dearly.” It would later influence some of her life choices. “I decided I wanted to be a curator and an educator, not just a creator. A lot of it was to honor all the friends that I had lost. It became my mission to make as many artists as possible in the world.”

While pursuing a career as a visual artist and choreographer, Allyson became a professor at San Diego State University, (teaching her first class on September 11, 2001) and then University of California, San Diego. She was the artistic director of a multidisciplinary center in San Diego called Sushi Performance and Visual Arts, and the Chair of Theater and Dance at UCSD. It wasn’t until she came to New York on a sabbatical to assist a friend working on an opera at the MET that she was offered the position of Associate Dean of Performing Arts at Tisch, and later the position of Dean of Tisch.

“When President Sexton offered me the opportunity to become the fourth Dean of the school, he told me that it was going to be very tough, but to always look for the joy.”

“I get so much joy and inspiration from the work of these amazing students, the alumni, the faculty, the staff who are so dedicated. I have worked all over and there are remarkable artists everywhere, but there is something about the particular community and learning-by-doing inside of Tisch. That’s a great incubator. Whenever I’m at my desk and feeling stuck on a computer, I go to a studio or a screening, or go to a show, and I see what they are doing, and it blows me away.”

Her description of the dean position is being a good translator of different kinds of vocabularies, being a mediator of conflicts, and being a curator to gather people and ideas together (to “care” about the arts). 

In terms of meetings, she has plenty, and there are a tremendous amount of emails. Every week, she has budget meetings, development meetings for fundraising, meetings with the leadership above her, meetings with her immediate dean's team, meetings with chairs, meetings with students... “It's a lot of social time and attending events, and that hasn’t changed with COVID. It’s the same but now some is in person and some is online.” However, Allyson admits that since COVID-19, she has been in way more planning meetings than she used to be.

© Picture: EVG Media

© “Keep Fighting” by Eric Hart Jr., a current student in the Department of Photography and Imaging.

© EVG Media

“Have some discipline and a daily routine.”

“I’m thankful that the art I started with was dance because dance teaches you at an early age that you have to have a daily discipline and a ritual.” In fact, Allyson still has an early morning yoga and dance practice. She also reads regularly. With a group of friends, she started what they call the “daily practice” of sending each other something creative every single day: a one-minute video, a photo, a short recording, anything. “If I don’t have that daily practice, I can’t do the rest of the day very well.”

“To be a good dean, you have to be a collaborative thinker, and your top priority has to be the students.”

Educating the next generation is important to Allyson, and she believes that it should be a priority to anyone who’s looking to become a dean. “Being dean requires patience, resilience, and perseverance. It’s important to be a collaborative thinker and encourage other people to lead. The position doesn’t allow time for micromanaging. The dean sets a vision for the school and puts people around him or her who share those values.”

When she became dean, one of the things that Allyson developed was a structure for the school which is made of three institutes: performing arts, emerging media arts, and film and television. She made an associate dean in charge of each institute, so chairs would have someone to speak to if she wasn’t available. Her team is also constituted of a Chief of Staff and Associate and Assistant Deans of Students Affairs; Faculty; Strategic Initiatives; Diversity; Development; Communications; Creative Research; and people working on special projects, among others. “You can’t do it alone, for sure.”

© Picture: EVG Media / © “Keep Fighting” by Eric Hart Jr., a current student in the Department of Photography and Imaging.

“We have to make sure that students have all the skills and tools they need to succeed in a 21st-century environment.”

Tisch has a Future Imagination Fund where they encourage imagining the future through the arts with projects, collaboratories and fellows in residence. By doing so, they try to help their students perform to the best of their abilities by gathering all the creative skills they need for the future.

“The World Economic Forum said that some of the skills that are going to be the most needed in the future are creativity, ability to deal with ambiguity, and problem-solving. Things which we are doing. [...] What we do is create content, to tell our stories, and content will always be needed. We, the artists, will never become obsolete.”

“What students are learning now will prepare them for every job. But they’ll also learn that it’s not about instant commercial success but about a process for a life in the arts: some may have it, and some people find success years after being in the class.”

“Despite the challenges of the pandemic, students are doing some of the most interesting works which I’ve seen in the past five years.”

Tisch was set up in the 60s as a very particular model run by faculty who are professionals. If a student wants to be a film director or a cinematographer, they will have to learn all the positions first, so in the end not only do they know what they want to do, but also what they are going to be asking of the people they work with. The mantra of the school is “to learn by doing.”

In fact, many graduates are doing great. Looking at Chloe Zhao who received a Golden Globe for best director last week; Sikivu Hutchinson Ph.D who received the 2020 Harvard Humanist of the Year Award; photographer Tyler Mitchell; conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas; performers Javier Munoz and Ali Stroker; filmmakers Karishma Dev Dube, Talia Smith, and Shaka King; and songwriter Maggie Rogers, we can say that the Tisch community continues to welcome incredibly talented artists from all over the world and art citizens who are making an impact on their communities.