AUGUST 21, 2025, 11 AM

Jane Raleigh, Malik Burnett, and Mallory Miller were all fired on the same day. They each received an ominous email from John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Human Resources Department asking them to report to the HR Office immediately. They knew what was coming. As the sole members of the Kennedy Center’s Dance Programming team, they had spent months watching their colleagues in other departments be siphoned off en masse. 

 

“The legal person said, ‘You’re here because the Kennedy Center Office of the President has lost faith in the direction of dance programming, and you are being fired immediately,” Burnett recounts. 

 

Raleigh smirks. “My greatest triumph of the meeting was that after they had given us the two minute spiel of why we were being dismissed, they asked us if we had any questions. I said, ‘Oh well, the most important question is this: who will be taking care of the company of artists that arrive in five minutes?’” Raleigh remembers upper management scrambling to record all of the details of the evening’s performance, including the artists’ names, the performance venue, and pertinent details for the show. 

 

FEBRUARY–AUGUST 2025

“It was February 7th. I think…5:30 or 6 PM, Donald Trump was tweeting that he was going to be chairman of the Kennedy Center,” Mallory Miller, former Assistant Manager of Dance Programming remembers. “And I was like, ‘The organization can’t sustain that. This is a non-partisan or bipartisan institution.’ What happened is an even more rapid decline than I could have imagined.”

 

In February, President Trump dismissed 18 Kennedy Center board members appointed by the Biden administration and ousted longtime donor and Board chair, David M. Rubenstein. Trump then fired Deborah Rutter, the Kennedy Center’s President of nearly eleven years. Rutter was replaced by Richard Grenell, Trump’s former U.S. Ambassador to Germany. Grenell has some writing and producing credits, but is best known for his diplomacy and public relations work for the State Department. Go figure. 

 

In March, seven equity-focused staff members of the Social Impact Department were fired, in addition to Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the department’s Artistic Director. In May, in an effort spearheaded by Miller and Burnett with vocal support from Raleigh, Kennedy Center workers voted to unionize. 

 

AUGUST 21, 2025, 5 PM

Learning of Jane, Malik, and Mallory’s firing piqued my journalistic curiosity, frightened me as an artist, and saddened me as a community member and friend. I performed at the Kennedy Center the night they were fired and, even though they had all just received their termination notices, they showed up for us. My castmate learned of the firings via text message while we were backstage. I could hardly believe it until I saw the headlines myself. Jane, Malik, and Mallory still showed up. The three of them focused their energy on celebrating our performance and expressing their pride. 

 

Through shared social and professional circles over the last five years, I have attended conferences with Jane, sweat through house dance phrases with Malik, and hustled through staffing events with Mallory. They were gracious enough to share their life stories with me—from their beginnings in dance, to their respective pathways to arts administration careers and the Kennedy Center, to their shared last day.

 

JANE

A former trina, or ballerina-in-training, Jane Raleigh is a walking catalogue of technicolor pantsuits. As a young dancer, she made it her mission to convince her parents to purchase a Kennedy Center ballet subscription. Jane knew that she did not fit the mold of the classical ballerina–thin, small-chested, tall, hypermobile, ultra-arched feet–and decided to flex her academic muscles. She enrolled at the College of William and Mary to major in Spanish and minor in Dance, still nurturing her love of the arts by attending the Mark Morris Dance Group Summer Intensive and the American Dance Festival internship program. 

 

In 2013, Jane began an internship with the Kennedy Center before steadily ascending to roles as a Group Sales Associate, Dance Programming Coordinator, Dance Programming Assistant Manager, Dance Programming Manager, Dance Programming Co-Director, and finally, Dance Programming Director. By August 21, 2025, Jane had served the Kennedy Center for over 12 years. 

 

MALIK

Malik Burnett is a light-footed, tawny-skinned man whose tranquil demeanor juxtaposes his sheer dynamism as a dance artist. A Maryland native and an alumnus of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Malik’s journey into arts administration was a slow burn. Drained from auditioning throughout the country, he decided to pursue a career in arts administration after building a youth dance program for the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission as its Dance Coordinator and Program Facility Manager. A graduate of American University’s Master of Arts in Arts Management Program, he was hired for a Dance Coordinator position (later called Assistant Manager) in the spring of 2021, right after he graduated with his MA.  

 

MALLORY

Another former trina, Mallory Miller is an outspoken Midwesterner, a cat-lover, and an advocate with a vested commitment to fairness, justice, and equity, particularly in the workplace. Like Malik, Mallory also enrolled in the MA in Arts Management program through American University. In 2023, during her second year, she landed a Dance Programming Assistant Manager role at the Kennedy Center. “I trained in classical ballet for more than half of my life at that point, and the opportunity to curate classical ballet and work with ballet companies was pure bliss,” Mallory beams. “Actually, the best part about working at the Kennedy Center was that everyone was so smart. They were all so excellent…we were rowing in the same direction. And we had the resources that we needed in order to do great work.”

 

THE TEAM 

Jane, Malik and Mallory were a fully-formed team by June of 2023. They each expressed pride in their work together and the initiatives they pushed forward at the Kennedy Center “I think we were making progress towards this notion of really connecting the ballet side of programming and the [contemporary] dance side of programming in terms of curatorial arc,” Jane shares. “I was doing a lot of internal advocacy to meld our language together and program more contemporary ballet that filled the chasm between classical story ballet and contemporary dance. I think if I had maybe five more years, we could have gotten there.” 

 

The Kennedy Center has a reputation for prioritizing national and international artists over local DMV artists in its programming. Malik is most proud of expanding opportunities for DMV artists through the Local Dance Commissioning Project, increasing artist compensation, providing increased studio space, and watching his own peers stretch artistically as a result of their involvement in the program. “I could realize what the artists and awardees [were] experiencing in the process while also booking tickets or booking studio space, doing all the admin things that would set the foundation of what I needed to do in the future.” Malik hopes to remain a champion of the local dance community in whatever capacity possible. 

 

Mallory is most proud of the collective organizing efforts that she and her peers at the Kennedy Center worked through in order to create a labor union. “I can say with a lot of confidence that I really believe the Kennedy Center United Arts Workers allowed people to get paychecks that they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. It allowed them to find an exit plan and it gave them hope in a way that they didn’t have before.” Mallory continues to advocate for the arts and arts workers to be free of government control through Hands Off the Arts.

 

NOW

Dance Programming is one of the many departments impacted by President Donald Trump’s usurping of the Kennedy Center. It is imperative to know the names and faces of the staff of the nation’s performing arts center, preceding its fascist takeover. Staff members of what should be a completely non-partisan, government-funded performing arts center are continuously terminated on a clearly political basis. With its new, authoritarian leadership, the Kennedy Center now overtly presses towards programming rooted in whiteness, Christian nationalism, heteronormativity, cisgenderism, ableism, and an otherwise incredibly narrow view of what existences should be privileged onstage and in our daily lives. What happens when political agendas take precedence over a nation’s desire to feel seen and supported in artistic spaces? 

 

I felt equal parts chuffed and downtrodden to read that the Kennedy Center’s ticket sales have taken a nosedive since Trump commandeered its halls. It’s almost as if the tireless efforts of leaders like Jane, Malik, Mallory to support local artists, bridge the programmatic divide between contemporary dance and ballet, and protect its workers actually brought communities together. The same could be said of their peers in other disciplines and departments. I would be curious to know how the new administration plans to fill the Kennedy Center’s venues by digging its heels into the supposed safety of bigoted sameness. It is the nation’s premiere performing arts center, a beacon of cultural and artistic representation for us all. 

 

Ashayla Byrd in Conversation with Malik Burnett, October 28.

Ashayla Byrd in Conversation with Mallory Miller, October 22.

Ashayla Byrd in Conversation with Jane Raleigh, October 22.