Lin Batsheva Kahn is a Theatre School Excellence in Teaching Honoree who teaches Modern Dance, Chicago Dancing, and her one-of-a-kind course Diversity in Dance: Paradigms Shifting which approaches racism, sexism, ageism, and ableism through the lens of dance. Creativity & Adversity, an interdisciplinary course about transcending hardship through the arts is taught in the department of Psychology.
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, Jewish theatre and has worked with many actors, poets, and musicians.
Lin is the founder and artistic director of MusicDance En-sem'-ble, a performance project of established and emerging musicians. She worked with composer Ilya Levinson and TTS alum Howard Friedland in a 2022 filmed project Night Table and created POUR, a site-specific piece with award-winning Third Coast Percussion in 2021 described as "brilliant in every conceivable way." The duet will be performed in the 2022 Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival at Ruth Page Dance Center.
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 in Solo Cello & Choreography.
An invited guest to Jerusalem where she taught and set choreography on Miriam Engel and Sergey Shamota from A'ngela Dance Company, Lin has created five teaching/performance events to bring this multicultural couple to campus including the 2021 virtual Moving Toward Action with Music & Dance supported by DePaul Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity, Vincentian Endowment Fund, School of Music, The Theatre School, and Jewish United Fund. Grants for teaching enhancement from DePaul QIC 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 six Woman of Spirit and Action awards from DePaul. Her Creativity & Adversity course ideas were selected and filmed at PBS WTTW as an ELI Talk. With over 4,500 views, the inspiring talk includes an excerpt of her choreography by two Chicago dance professionals.
Lin's work expressing themes of human significance has been seen worldwide, while her inclusive university teaching 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.