Episode 46: Gennean Scott

Change Comes as a Young Girl with Dance in her Heart

Gennean Scott is the Chief Diversity Officer for the Broadway League. She is the guardian of and the advocate for ensuring that the people and institutions behind the shimmering lights of Broadway shows are engaged in the same question that presently animates the conversations in our politics, in our schools and in our neighborhoods – how can we make these institutions more reflective of the diversity that is steadily growing within the world today? It is a question that she has been asking her whole life. From starting as a young dancer in Omaha, NE. To leading DE&I efforts at arts institutions in the heartland of America. To owning her own dance company that was committed to exposing underserved and underrepresented children to the beauty, the majesty, and the freedom of dance, Gennean has pushed at the edges of peoples’ perceptions to create space for new, more inclusive thoughts to take root and bloom. It’s all been a tall order for a young girl with dancing dreams in her heart, wearing mismatched “flesh-colored” tights and untamed hair that didn’t neatly slick back into a Balanchine-approved bun.

This tenacity to be an instrument of change has always been present for Gennean. Born to an unwed teen mother, she too would tread that same path of unexpected and single motherhood until she was able to break that cycle with her own children. She talks candidly about her struggle to disrupt the statistics, even as she had to rely on government assistance to support her family as she fought to stand on her own strengths. And she plaintively recounts the stony path to embrace her “blackness” in a world that did not reflect to her the exquisiteness and the resilience of what being black can be.

It would have been easy to give up. Some do. But like the heroines in the shows that she today helps facilitate, she used adversity to reach for the stars and seize the opportunities that came her way that led her out of despair into belief. Calling upon the strengths of her ancestors, the support of her mother, and a certainty that God was not going to let her fail, Gennean has built a life that allows her to say to herself and to us, “Bet on you! Trust you! Because it is good!”