Jorie Goins is a part-time MSLCE student from Miami and a Northwestern Wildcat through and through. She graduated from NU’s Medill School of Journalism in 2016 with a BA degree in Journalism, and she is now pursuing her MSLCE degree while working full-time at The Chicago Tribune as a content editor. Apart from her passion for reading and writing, Jorie also loves dancing; she started dancing at age 5 and competing at age 12. During her undergraduate years, Jorie nurtured her passion for dancing by minoring in dance and joining various campus dance groups, including Tonik Tap and Danceworks. She also served as the Publicity Chair and the Second Vice President of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc., one of the nine international and historically African American sororities.
After graduating from Medill, Jorie worked in PR, content agencies, and newspapers for several years while doing freelance writing and dancing professionally, not just as a performer but also as a dance teacher. As a young professional, Jorie’s ultimate career goal is to be a creative director: “My ultimate goal is to be the strategist and visionary behind performances, shows, and brands. Even the White House has a creative director. I want to be the visionary behind the creative voice of an organization, a brand, or a performance.” To better serve this career aspiration and be more intentional with what she hopes to gain out of a master’s program, Jorie came to the MSLCE program first to get a better look at creativity from a business perspective. “My biggest takeaway from this program is how to think strategically in the arts, which is historically an area where strategic thinking is not always necessary, and it’s not always the most rewarded or praised. You don’t hear people talking about artists and saying her strategy was amazing. But somebody is behind the scenes, strategizing so they can do that without taking the whole business with them wherever the spirit led them to go”, she said.
Self-identifying as a verbose and creative professional, Jorie hopes to bring beauty to the world with words and dances: “I’m unique, quirky, and a lover of words and beauty in all forms…part of what I love about dance is that I want to do my part to bring beauty into the world, not just on a surface level, but also in the way of making people feel something beautiful.” Jorie rejects the notion of denouncing dances or other art forms that are purely entertaining because she thinks sometimes that’s exactly what people need: “I want to create art and stories that make people think, but I don’t like that people think the dance world is supposed to be divided into those who want to entertain and those who want to make people think…No, there’s an overlap. One is not inferior to the other, and each can take from the other. Everybody doesn’t need to have an epiphany whenever they see something I do. If they just leave happier than they came and feel more beautiful on the inside, then I feel like I’ve done my job.”
by Olive Mingxuan Ju
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