Lin Batsheva Kahn is a Theatre School Excellence in Teaching Honoree who teaches Modern Dance, Improvisation/Composition, Choreography for Performance, Dance for Film, and her one-of-a-kind course Diversity in Dance: Paradigms Shifting which approaches racism, sexism, ageism, and ableism through the lens of dance.
A productive, innovative choreographer, she created a commissioned piece for Cleveland Contemporary Dance Theater to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata reviewed as "skillfully crafted" by dance critic Wilma Salisbury, The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Lin has choreographed for dance companies, university dance programs, musical theatre, children's theatre, and Jewish theatre. Her choreography has been called "stunning, striking, substantial."
Founder and Artistic Director of
MusicDance En-sem'-ble, a performance project of established and emerging musicians, she has worked with composer Ilya Levinson and TTS alum Howard Friedland in a filmed project
Night Table, award-winning Third Coast Percussion in a site-specific and staged piece POUR, described as "brilliant in every conceivable way" and her duet
in-to light was performed in Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival and Trifecta Celebration of Dance, both at Ruth Page Center for the Arts.
Ongoing collaboration with faculty from the DePaul School of Music includes choreography with Michael Kozakis' Percussion Ensemble, Michael Lewanski's 20+Ensemble, Harry Silverstein's Opera Theatre Nozze di Figaro, The Fairy Queen, Dido and Aeneas with Eric Esparza and Jason Moy, and for The Theatre School A Dybbuk: Or Between Two Worlds. Called a "powerhouse on stage", she has performed with faculty violinist Olga Kaler, trumpeter Chad McCullough, and cellist Stephen Balderston.
Lin has created and directed eight teaching/performance international dance events on campus supported by DePaul Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity, Vincentian Endowment Fund, Quality of Instruction Council, Theatre School Diversity Office, and Jewish United Fund. DePaul teaching enhancement grants include the University of Hertfordshire in London with dance psychologist Dr. Peter Lovatt, Axis Dance Company in California, and study with Joffrey Ballet Chicago.
Additional honors include Chicago Jewish News' Jewish Chicagoan of the Year, Today's Chicago Woman magazine's 100 Women of Inspiration, Artist Educator of the Year from the Ohio Alliance for Arts in Education, and numerous Woman of Spirit and Action awards from DePaul. Her Creativity & Adversity course ideas were selected and filmed at PBS WTTW as an ELI Talk. The inspiring talk includes an excerpt of her choreography by two Chicago dance professionals.
Lin's dances expressing themes of human significance have been seen worldwide, while her university teaching approach at DePaul has impacted students from across the United States and countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Peru, India, Hungary, Germany, Korea, China, Uzbekistan, and Singapore.