It’s easy for Kate Yancho, executive director of Kalamazoo RESA’s Education for the Arts (EFA) program, to identify the aspect of her career that she’s most passionate about: mentoring young artists.
In a previous position working with students at Kalamazoo College, it was often that “the artsy students would come and find me” for mentorship and help finding their paths, she recalls.
“That’s where, I think, I really found my voice as an administrator,” Yancho says.
From Yancho’s perspective, the EFA program is pivotal for students, and she’s received the feedback to prove it.
“We often hear that on days when EFA will be there, they (the students) come to school. We drive attendance because they want to come do that,” Yancho says. “I’ve heard principals in this community say if it was not for the EFA class that Student A is enrolled in, they don’t know if they would have made it through this year or to graduation.”
How did you get where you are today?
I grew up just south of Canton, Ohio. My dad was a coal miner. My mom was in the theater and my dad was a musician when he wasn’t coal mining, so we grew up in a really artsy home. I started dancing when I was seven and danced through high school. I did community and high school theater and just loved to perform. I got a degree in dance performance in 2005 from Kent State University. While there, I worked on campus in an administrative position. It was so cool. In our department, we had a staff of event planners doing on-campus programming for students. We ran a post office and a studio where graphic design students could have on-campus jobs designing works for other on-campus entities. I became the manager of that department, working fulltime managing 50 other undergraduate students.
I worked at the College of Wooster for a year after I graduated and then went to Ohio State University for a master’s degree in higher education and student affairs programming. After grad school, I was looking for a job at a small liberal arts institution because I felt that’s where I could have a bigger impact on students. I was hired as the assistant director of student activities at Kalamazoo College in 2008 and did that for eight years. I also advised the student dance company organization at K and convinced the physical education department to let me teach some for-credit dance classes and eventually got pulled into choreographing a couple of musicals for K’s theater department.
I left K College to be the executive director at Wellspring Dance (formerly Wellspring/Cori Terry & Dancers). I really enjoyed the work at Wellspring and it was a hard decision to leave there for the role of executive director of Education for the Arts, but I think it was the right decision. I started at EFA in May 2025 and continued working for Wellspring for three months while they transitioned in a new executive director. I’ve just celebrated not only my first year, but my first full school year, with EFA.
What does Education for the Arts do?
I am the principal of a county-wide high school arts program. We don’t have our own building; we work either in local school districts — for instance, we have a very robust dance program at both Loy Norrix and Kalamazoo Central high schools with multiple dance classes per day taught by our staff — or students leave their buildings, go to the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts or the Epic Center and work with arts organizations as a class for credit.
We also have different residency programs where teachers work with us to bring teaching artists into their classes once a week for six to eight weeks, building lessons collaboratively. If a class is working on some concept of shadow in science, they’ll build this whole residency around: “What can we do with dance and shadows?”
Another residency program focuses on a work of art. We connect with the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts on two exhibits and build our own traveling exhibit to take into schools. That program also brings a teaching artist to build a residency where the students get to test out the methods or the themes of that work of art. Then they go see the piece, explore it and reflect upon how they saw what they learned in that work of art.
We also have a program for special education and alternative ed students. Those residencies are really flexible because the needs of those students may be very different. We produce a multi-sensory art project every year in collaboration with the Civic Theatre, where students help produce a performance. Special education students can see and experience the work in a place that feels very open and accessible to them.
Finally, we are grateful to be the re-grantor, if you will, of funding from the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation for educators in the community who want money to access arts experiences. We have several different grant programs for educators — like a science teacher who wants to do more artistic things and needs to take a workshop to learn how to do that, or who wants to partner with an artist and needs funding. We also have a big student grant program where students can apply to get tuition support, support to attend camps or new equipment.
Tell us about the new strategic plan for EFA.
There’s a lot of emphasis in the strategic plan to bring more visibility to the impact we have on students, particularly in areas of arts education, which inherently builds collaboration, creativity and communication skills, all of which are important right now as we start navigating the world of AI and how technology changes how we do things. We cannot lose touch with how we are human and how we connect to ourselves and see ourselves.
We’re currently working on revised mission and vision statements and a menu of services that will make it more clear to the community about what we offer. At the same time, how can we be sure we’re preparing a pipeline of teaching artists and people who can do that work? That’s where the bulk of our focus will be.
— Interview by Jordan Bradley, edited for length and clarity
