Meryl Cates ’08

Meryl Cates is a New York City-based writer who has been published in the New York Times, the New Yorker’s Culture Desk, the Paris Review Daily, Dance Magazine, Billboard, the Dancing Times (London), Interview Magazine, among others outlets. She’s also a senior publicist at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

While primarily writing about dance, Cates’ work has also covered theater, literature, and even an afternoon planting flowers and herbs in poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s upstate New York garden.

Her extensive research on Zelda Fitzgerald’s dance training in the United States and in France has appeared in several publications. 

The BALA Effect

Cates (BALA: Journalism, Dance) was the first ever to combine dance and journalism in the BALA program. She found the journalism class she took sophomore year to be exciting and challenging, prompting a detour from her original academic route.

“Creating the curriculum for my BALA was one of the most empowering moments of my college career,” she explains. While the major does allow freedom and flexibility, it’s not an easy one. “Discipline and motivation were key because the course load of a BALA is very rigorous,” she says.

Cates, who hails from Mahopac, NY, describes her career as varied, but “always rooted in the arts and journalism.”

“The discipline and, ultimately, the confidence that the major required me to develop, helped me to prepare for my winding career path.”