Meet the Director

Pamela Tatge is the Executive & Artistic Director of Jacob’s Pillow, an international dance Festival, professional School, and Archives located in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. Tatge is responsible for setting the artistic vision and strategic goals for all aspects of the organization, including Festival programming, education, preservation, audience engagement, residency programming and artist support, long-term planning, collaborative programming, fundraising, marketing, and more.

Tatge began work at the Pillow in 2016 and in 2017 spearheaded the creation of Vision ‘22, a strategic approach to the Pillow’s development through 2022. This blueprint enabled Jacob’s Pillow to become a year-round center for dance research and development, and included creating the Pillow Lab, an incubator of new work; enhancing the Pillow’s civic leadership and community engagement; and renewing campus facilities. Following the pandemic and the destruction of the Doris Duke Theatre due to a tragic fire, Tatge is leading a campaign to build a new theater for the future of dance and a digital platform that provides access to the Pillow’s programs to audiences around the world. 

For nearly 17 years, Tatge served as the Director of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. Initiatives that were launched and developed during her tenure include the Creative Campus Initiative, integrating arts into non-arts areas of the curriculum; the Green Street Center for Teaching and Learning; Feet to the Fire, examining environmental sustainability through an arts lens; and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, the first-ever Masters degree in Performance Curation.

Tatge was named one of “The Most Influential People in Dance Today” by Dance Magazine in 2017 and is the recipient of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ 2010 William Dawson Award for Programmatic Excellence and Sustained Achievement in Programming. In 2022, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Jose Limón Dance Foundation and has served extensively as a panelist for grants and awards including as a member of the jury for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music. She is also the recipient of the NAACP Berkshires Dunham Freedom Fund Award 2024, “An activist for Peace, Justice, Equity, and Equality in the Art of Dance.” Prior to her work at Wesleyan, Tatge spent a decade as the Director of Development at Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, CT.

Tatge holds a B.A. in History and an M.A.L.S. from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She is married to artist Jerry Zinser and is the mother of four children.