Katherine Campbell, the Artist Who Doubles up as a Teacher
The lack of assistance for the uninsured in the American welfare system presented Bocconi with an English teacher and dance instructor. To understand why you can find the name of Katherine Campbell both on the list of Bocconi professors and among the Bocconi gym (Unifit) staff you must go back to the early 1980s' New York.
"I grew up in the greatest city in the world, the big apple, and in a magical time", Katherine says, "when Igor Stravinsky, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Rudolph Nureyev, Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett were the driving forces of the artistic life in town. I have been studying piano and dance since the age of 4 and was very fortunate to have studied and performed with the great masters until when, during a dance performance, I broke my right foot. With no assistance for injured dancers in NYC at that time, I had to reinvent myself and devised a method to stay fit, based on dance techniques".
The method was so successful that her agent suggested she move to London, "where I taught celebrities and aristocrats for two and a half incredible years", she remembers. And it was her agent again that convinced her to relocate to Italy, where the television market was effervescent thanks to the rise of private stations, paramount among all them the Fininvest channels. Both in England and in Italy she would manage her activities through her own companies and she even registered her training method as Kat's NY Workout.
"I worked as a ballerina and a choreographer", she says, "until the television choreography/dance job market dried up, when low-budget reality shows took the place of the traditional 'varietà'. Anyway, I've never been a single-profession person and through all these years I've been teaching dance. I have taught in practically every important dance school in Milan, including teaching workshops and dance festivals in every region of Italy and throughout Europe and the USA".
After receiving her Cambridge English Certification, "I started teaching English and found that the mechanisms of teaching are basically the same regardless of the topic", Katherine says. "You have to understand the students' needs, focus on them and help to guide each and every one towards their personal fulfillment, regardless of what you are teaching".
Katherine has been teaching English at Bocconi since 2007, leveraging her artistic and show business experiences. "I look at the students as complete individuals", she says, "with their interests and passions. When they can exercise spoken English and write about what they love, their performance immediately improves".
She became interested in the Bocconi gym one year and a half ago, when it moved from a cramped, underground room to its current large, bright space where she now offers the two components of Kat's NY Workout "Dance Fit" and "Power Dance" to both Bocconi and non-Bocconi students alike. "Dance Fit", Katherine says, "is a new way to attain muscular definition and flexibility. With Power Dance, the objective is to inspire a strong sense of physical and artistic expression for my students".
Katherine Campbell as a teacher