February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Family and friends visiting the city would inevitably end up on 35th Avenue at 36th Street in Astoria, Queens.
“After the Empire State Building, this is where I brought them,” she said.
In 2001, she moved to an apartment just over the 30th Avenue border in Woodside, and she would stroll down for its weekend screenings of old classics and more recent hits like “The Soprawnos.”
“I don’t have cable,” she said.
Then in 2003, after almost a decade working in other museums, Kennedy was appointed Moving Image’s director of education, responsible for the 20,000 students, from fourth grade to college level, as well as senior groups, who visit annually.
The museum houses its comprehensive collection in a building that was used to make U.S. army training films through the 1970s.
“We teach the science, the technology, the history of film, and the art of it,” said Kennedy, who’s 36.
And, in a neighborhood that was at the center of America’s nascent movie industry and where TV shows and movies are still made, young people have an extraordinary learning environment, she said.
Beforehand, Kennedy and her staff must determine what a teacher’s focus is. If it’s science, for instance, the emphasis of a field trip might be on the idea of the moving image itself. The museum on its public tours explains in an engaging way how the concept emerged in the 19th century, using parlor toys like the Zoetrope and the Phenakistoscope.
Or a trip might be structured around a screening. One high-school teacher recently arranged for his students to see “12 Angry Men” so they could discuss the American jury system.
Kennedy’s preparation for her career in museum education goes back to her own childhood and her passion for theater.
The daughter of a Dublin-born father who was a homicide detective and is now deceased, and a Stuttgart-born mother, Kennedy studied at Philadelphia’s Creative and Performing Arts High School.
Kennedy left her home town at 17 to study for a degree in theater at New York University.
A few years later, she co-founded Gorilla Rep, a company that’s dedicated to accessible and free theater and has been performing the classics in New York City parks since the early 1990s.
“My personal world view was that the arts should educate, the arts should communicate, the arts should include,” she said.
Gorilla Rep’s approach was, Kennedy said, intended to be “fresh and lively. It was roll up with your dog; bring the kid in the stroller.”
She added: “Our mission is to bring classic theater to people where they are. We’re quite well known for doing ‘Midsummer’s Night Dream’ in Washington Square Park. That was our first piece and we’ve done that for over a decade. . . . [But] I still think the best thing we ever did was part of the C_chulainn cycle by Yeats.”
A job teaching Shakespeare at a private school led Kennedy to seriously consider postgraduate studies at Bank Street Graduate School of Education.
However, before she enrolled, she got a call from officials at the National Museum of the American Indian. They wanted her help with a play that was written by a Native American and was to be performed by Native American storytellers.
“From that first experience, I was hooked,” she recalled.
So when she did pursue her master’s degree in education, it was in Bank Street’s museum-education track.
After graduation she spent five years working for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
Borrowing from a famous kindergarten-titled book, she said: “Everything I need to know, I learned at the Tenement Museum.”
Again she used her theater experience in helping to develop the museum’s living history Confino program, in which visitors meet a 14-year-old immigrant girl in 1916.
“Lynda’s incredibly hard-working,” said Kate Fermoile, who worked with her on the Lower East Side.
The two women continued their collaborative friendship when they both got jobs at the Brooklyn Historical Society.
“She’s very open. I never had to guess what she was thinking,” said Fermoile, who’s also Irish American. “I miss her very much.”
The society’s loss was the Moving Image’s gain.
“I was flogging through on my own here,” said Adam Davison, the museum’s education manager. “She saved me in a lot of ways.”
There are inevitable stresses and strains associated with catering to the different needs, backgrounds and age groups of the several hundred students who visit on a daily basis.
She puts things in the proper context when things seem to be going badly, according to Davison. “She says: ‘nobody’s life is at stake,” he added. Every museum educator has a favorite age group, Kennedy said, and hers is middle school
“They’re half adult, half child,” she said. “They swing back and forth at the drop of a hat.
“They never seem to be entirely still. They’re developing sarcasm and they’re developing attitude. That drives a lot of people crazy, but I find them really fascinating.”
Kennedy also loves working with inner-city kids. “It’s a bigger deal for them to come to a museum,” she contended.
School students each are given a pass to return to the museum. And many do come back. “It’s so chock full of cool stuff, you never get through it, and the pass is good for them and a friend,” she said.
The museum, which gives visitors a behind-the-scenes look at movies and television, has 24 interactive experiences in areas such as animation, special effects and the latest digital technology.
The staff also gets a glimpse behind the scenes in other ways.
When the museum recently honored Richard Gere, the event was televised. “We got to see how an award show is put together,” she said. “It’s never dull.”
But there’s doesn’t seem to be a dull moment in Kennedy’s life, added Davison. “Lynda’s involved with so many things. Others would be overwhelmed,” he said.
Aside from ongoing theater commitments, she’s president of the International Museum Theater Alliance; she’s preparing to teach a class at City College in the summer, and she’s working toward a PhD in urban education at the Graduate Center of City University of New York.
Kennedy is also a member of the Irish Arts Center’s Friends Advisory Board.”I also take advantage of their music and dance classes,” she said.
At some point, though, Kennedy will concentrate on her doctoral studies.
When she finishes, she will certainly return to museum education.
Kennedy knew “from the get go” with that Museum of the American Indian assignment that she had found her vocation.
It combined, she said, “my love of theater, my love of history and my love of kids.”