Edith D'Addario, Director, Joffrey Ballet School, New York
At the original home of the Joffrey Ballet School in New York's Greenwich Village, Edith D'Addario directed the day-to-day operations, schedules, scholarships, performing programs, summer intensives, satellite programs, and more, since 1961.
It was a heady time at the The American Ballet Center, when Robert Joffrey, artistic director of the Joffrey Ballet and Gerald Arpino, its associate director, founded their school in 1952 and their company in 1956. D'Addario, as a mother waiting for her daughter to finish her class at the school, picked up a ringing phone one day and her future was sealed. She became the assistant to the two chorographers in 1961, and the school's executive director, in 1966.
The school and company gained national and world-wide recognition with its repertoire of standard works, contemporary choreography created by both choreographers and others, as well as for its superb company of dancers.
"I think what Mrs. D'Addario absorbed," says John Magnus, current artistic director of the school, and Joffrey's last appointee before his death in 1988, "is Joffrey's unerring taste and instinct for incorporating and initiating programs that would further the school's artistic and fiscal growth." D'Addario added her own humanitarian efforts, in what became an award-winning program in ballet developed for deaf children. She was generous on a need basis in granting scholarships. She also created a trainee program, 1981/82, that attracted students from over the world. Many of the students from the trainee program became members of the Joffrey Ballet, now located in Chicago, and have performed with other professional companies, as well. She also expanded the summer intensive training project to four major cities across the United States.
D'Addario passed away on March 4, at the age of 84, from complications of emphysema. At the time of her death, the Joffrey Ballet was on tour and performing in Brooklyn. She is survived by her daughters, Diane Green of San Francisco, a grandson, Chris, and Gail D'Addario, who became director of the school in 2005.