Molly Lynch

Molly Lynch is an award-winning choreographer and artistic director with more than 40 years of experience creating, producing, and presenting dance. She is professor and former chair the Department of Dance at UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts, where she teaches ballet, pointe, repertory, senior seminar, and arts management. She is also the founder and artistic director of the National Choreographers Initiative, an internationally recognized project that nurtures the development of new choreography.

From 1988 to 2003, Lynch served as artistic director of Ballet Pacifica, establishing it as Orange County’s leading professional dance company and one of the region’s top performing arts organizations. She launched the Pacifica Choreographic Project, through which the company collaborated with 40 choreographers, premiered more than 40 new ballets, and restaged beloved classics by George Balanchine, Antony Tudor, and Choo San Goh. She has choreographed more than 40 concert and story ballets, six children’s ballets, and a full-length production of The Nutcracker. Her commissions include works for Sacramento Ballet, Nashville Ballet, BalletMet in Columbus, Ohio, Singapore Dance Theatre, Dance Collage in Hermosillo, Mexico, and the Academies of Ballet in Manila.

Lynch began her training with Lila Zali, later receiving a scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet. She performed as a soloist and principal dancer with the Louisville Ballet and Ballet Pacifica for more than a decade. At UC Irvine, where she majored in fine arts, she studied with distinguished figures including Eugene Loring, Antony Tudor, and Olga Maynard. She received her M.F.A. in dance from UCI, where she was named Outstanding Graduate Student, the first from the School of Fine Arts to receive the honor.

Her accolades include UCI’s Outstanding Alumnus Award (1992) and Distinguished Alumni Award (2023); OC Metro magazine’s “Ten Women Who Make a Difference”; the Red Cross Clara Barton Cultural Arts Award; the Boy Scouts of America Women of Excellence Award (1996); the Choo San Goh Award for Choreography (2001); Arts Orange County’s Outstanding Arts Organization Award for the National Choreographers Initiative (2007); the Irvine Barclay Theatre’s Jade Award (2008); and UCI’s Dean’s Honoree for Excellence in Undergraduate Education (2009, 2014). In 2017, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Arts Visionary from Arts Orange County.