Margaret “Maggie” Stack ’09
Margaret “Maggie” Stack ’09 is an instructor and choreographer at Loft Dance Theater Arts in Reno, Nevada, where she teaches ballet and contemporary dance. A professional dancer for 10 years, she performed in the Bay area and internationally with Oberlin Dance Collective, Bellwether Dance, Project Thrust, FACT/SF, Little Seismic Dance Company, CabinFever, and Cali & Co., among others.
Stack, from Pittsburgh, knew she wanted to be a professional ballet dancer at age
5. “There was nothing else I was going to do, and I never faltered from that plan,”
she says.
At age 7 she began her rigorous training at Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, which continued through high school until she suffered a foot injury. Realizing a ballet career was now likely out of reach, she enrolled at Skidmore, following in the footsteps of her mother, Nancy Stack ’74, and majored in studio art. It didn’t take long for her to switch her major to dance after taking a ballet class for fun, and she was back to doing what she loved most.
“Skidmore’s Dance Department was such a breath of fresh air,” says Stack, who recovered from her injury. She credits several faculty members for rekindling her ambition. “Denise Limoli encouraged me to take ballet every semester and then Deb Fernandez said I must join her choreography class. Mary Harney insisted I try her modern dance class — all three women became quick heroes in my life.”
Her dance professors and classmates became a “lifeline” in her freshman year when her father died unexpectedly.
“I don’t know how I would have made it through without their support,” she says. “Dance was the thing that brought me back to life, and they were the ones who nurtured that relationship.”
Stack’s journey took another pivotal turn during her senior year when she met Summer Rhatigan, founder and director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, who came to campus as a guest artist. Rhatigan became her professional mentor, and she joined the Conservatory two weeks after graduation, eventually teaching dance there for seven years.
Stack, also a guest artist at the University of Nevada, Reno and co-producer of the Reno Dance Festival, continues to explore and expand her expertise and interests in the world of dance.
“Dance is still my everything. I don't know where I'd be without it,” she says.
