Portraits of Impact
Kaitlyn Weirich
Dancer, History Student Works to Blend Disciplines into a Career
Growing up outside Memphis, Tennessee, meant Kaitlyn Weirich BA’24, an arts in history graduate student, spent most of her childhood in museums and dance studios. A lover of the arts from a young age, Weirich dreamed of those passions being more than hobbies. When she started applying to universities, she searched for programs that could transform her pursuits into a career.
“I was looking at schools that offered National Merit Scholarship,” Weirich said. “I had a dance teacher who actually went to UT Dallas who mentioned the University to me. I started to investigate it and thought it was a great fit for me since it offered both history and dance.”
The University of Texas at Dallas offers complete coverage of tuition and mandatory fees for eight semesters through the National Merit Scholars Program in the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College. It grants $4,000 per semester as a cash stipend, $1,500 for on-campus housing, $6,000 to support international education and a one-time summer research stipend of $4,500.
Weirich also worked as a student worker in the dean’s suite of the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology and received the Gavin R. G. Hambly Endowed Scholarship, which is available to Bass School undergraduates pursuing a degree in history.
“Having that money has been absolutely amazing, especially as an out-of-state student,” Weirich said. “It covered pretty much everything I needed for my degrees.”
Weirich used her scholarships to fund and earn two bachelor’s degrees – one in history and one in visual performing arts with a concentration in dance. For her senior year capstone project, she decided to do something a little different than most of her peers.
As a dancer on the UTDance Ensemble, Weirich was confident she could choreograph and perform a 22-minute piece. She centered her performance around her history degree, the glamorization of World War II.
“The government used ideas of womanhood and femininity to get women to work during the war,” Weirich said. “I decided for my dance capstone to explore different aspects of women’s lives, like people who were waiting for their husbands to return, but also women in combat zones, whose lives and countries had been torn apart by war.”
After graduating in May, she is continuing her studies at UT Dallas to work on a master’s degree. Weirich recognizes the University is largely perceived as a STEM-focused school but wants others to know that does not mean the arts and humanities are forgotten.
“I remember when I first came here, everyone said I was crazy to study art and history because they are not seen as lucrative career paths,” Weirich said. “But I think that funding the humanities is crucial because of the lessons it teaches us, like how to think critically. Funding the arts helps us have greater conversations while preserving who we are as humans, and just because we have a predominantly STEM school does not mean we have foregone those talks and lessons.”
After graduation, Weirich plans to make history more interactive and to challenge stereotypes of stuffy classrooms and memorizing dates.
“I want to combine the arts and investigate how we can use things like dance and music to tell stories of the past and get people interested in history,” Weirich said. “I don’t know if that’s necessarily a job title, but that’s what I want to do.”