Alumni Spotlight: Samantha Jakus

Degree: BFA, Dance, 2009
Occupation: Dare Devil
Location: New York, NY

Suspend everything you think you know about who a dancer is and what a dancer does. Meet Samantha Jakus, BYR ’09.

She never has.

Whether it’s running down the side of the Bergdoff Goodman building in New York or leaping off a 30-foot high piece of scaffolding and landing on her face, she’s done it. These feats and more are what is expected of her as a company member of STREB Extreme Action Company.

STREB redefines modern dance and defies the realm of impossibility with cutting-edge movements, stunts and choreography.  Their motto? “Be ready for anything.”

As a Temple Dance alumna, Samantha was and is ready – every day, for anything. Her training in the program helped her develop her work ethic, face her fears and use those fears to challenge herself and accomplish the unimaginable. When asked how she is able to push herself in this way, she says, “I know this place. I know what it means to be ready to go. I know how to take on anything given to me. Temple taught me that.”

Samantha credits the life lessons she learned at Temple with always keeping her two steps ahead of the game and learning to give 110% in everything she does. As a freshman, she vividly remembers Professor Kun-Yang Lin telling her “Never stop thinking about the dance.”

Samantha has been featured in Dance Magazine, appeared on E! Television’s Talk Soup, National Geographic’s Brain Games, two documentary films, PBS, interviewed in The New Yorker, and photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Her notable performances include London Cultural Olympiad, Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, Pan American Games Toronto, Canada, The Holland Dance Festival The Hague, Netherlands, Just for Laughs Festival Montreal Canada, The Park Avenue Armory, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Delacorte Theater and Bergdorf Goodman Holiday Reveal.