Dartmouth College

Aleskie assumed her role at Dartmouth College in April 2017. She is charged with leading the advancement of the Hopkins Center for the Arts and arts and creativity at Dartmouth. The hallmark of her efforts will build on interdisciplinary projects linking the arts with humanities and STEM initiatives across campus and overseeing the evolution of the Hopkins Center into a 21​st century state-of-the-art facility. She came to Dartmouth from New Haven, Conn., where, since 2005, she was the director of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. As director, she produced critically acclaimed performances that fostered local as well as international engagement.

Under Aleskie’s leadership, the 15-day series of performing arts, lectures, and public conversations was cited by the National Endowment for the Arts as one of the top five arts presentations in the nation. It is considered the largest international multi-disciplinary festival in New England, and one of the only festivals in North America that blend performances from around the world with dialogues among leading thinkers. From 2002-05, Aleskie served as President and CEO of La Jolla Music Society, San Diego’s premier presenter of world-renowned orchestras, dance companies, and soloists and producer of the award-winning chamber music festival, La Jolla SummerFest. For the decade prior Aleskie was Executive Director of Da Camera of Houston, the ensemble music presenter and producer in residence at the world renowned Menil Collection, acclaimed for its original productions of theatricalized concerts. Aleskie is an internationally known advocate for the power of the arts to bring people together, not only within local communities, but around the globe. She is immediate past chair of the board of the International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA), a New York-based global association for performing arts leaders with 500 members from 60 countries, where she has served on the executive committee for nearly a decade. She is also a National Arts Strategies Executive Global Fellow, having completed leadership development programs at Harvard School of Business, University of Michigan Ross School of Business and University of Texas McCombs School of Business. She also serves on the Arts Advisory Committee of the Yale-China Association, the Public Art Committee at Dartmouth and Dartmouth’s newly established Environmental Humanities Leadership Committee. While in New Haven, she was appointed by the Connecticut State Senate Majority Leader to serve on the State’s Planning Commission for Higher Education, was an Associate Fellow of Branford College at Yale University and a lecturer in theater management at the Yale School of Drama.

Samantha is a theatermaker, performance scholar, and teacher who joined the Hop in 2018. She holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania where she studied English, Theater, Classics, and Fine Art, and an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. She has written for both journalistic and scholarly publications, and specializes in experimental theater and devised performance. She works to unite the performing arts and academia as Curator of Academic Programming at the Hop, where she endeavors to engage the public in new ideas and forge connections between artists, scholars, and students.