Faye Yvette McQueen ’83

As a dancer, Faye Yvette McQueen ’83 is known for her passion, ability to command a stage, and the boldness of her leaps. The same can be said of her approach to life.

As a young professional in Atlanta, McQueen founded a nonprofit dance school in an empty warehouse with the goal of teaching dance to underprivileged youths. When the cost of renovations threatened the project, she moved into the space herself and learned to hang Sheetrock.

More recently, when playing an extra on a Law & Order episode, McQueen was asked if she could perform Krav Maga.

She said, “Of course,” then headed home to google the phrase.

She watched a YouTube video, returned to the set the next morning, and put on a grand show performing the martial art form developed for the Israel Defense Force and derived from judo, wrestling, and street fighting. The director noticed; McQueen was given a bigger part and appeared in several scenes alongside lead actor Mariska Hargitay.

McQueen’s “can-do” philosophy, professional successes, and generosity were celebrated in February when she was presented the 2016 Marguerite Barland ’60 Merit Award by the Alumnae & Alumni of Goucher College (AAGC). The award citation noted that McQueen has “used her love of movement, choreography, teaching, and performing to inspire not just students and audiences, but whole communities, as well.”

By age 12, she had founded a studio called “Dancer’s Delight,” through which she offered dance lessons to neighborhood children then directed them in shows at the nursing homes where her mother worked. “I caught the bug early on. I always wanted to teach, and I always

wanted to perform,” McQueen says. “Something I learned first as a little girl and then at Goucher was ‘seize the opportunity.’ And I learned to have the confidence to never say ‘no.’ Never say ‘no’ and never give up.”

Growing up in Jamaica, NY, McQueen was shy and a bit awkward. Her parents, hoping to bolster her confidence, signed her up for dance lessons at a local Y. Soon, McQueen was pirouetting and jeté-ing all over the house. “When I danced, people smiled at me,” she says. “I thought: ‘I want to do this.’”

As a teenager, McQueen taught dance and performed as an actor and dancer in high school productions or as a volunteer instructor at a drug prevention center for youths. She also studied at The Ailey School and the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. At Goucher, she majored in dance education and minored in Spanish and threw herself into the spectrum of performing arts available on campus. After graduating, she studied for another year at The Ailey School while performing professionally in the New York area, including in off-Broadway musicals and with the companies Liberation Ensemble and the Inspiration Dance Ensemble.

While she was in graduate school at Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts, she was recruited to teach dance at the W.E. Griener Middle School Exploratory Arts Academy. “I was the one they recruited because I had studied dance education at Goucher,” she says.

In 1988, McQueen founded the nonprofit school The Dancer’s Warehouse Inc. Under McQueen’s leadership, the school grew to serve about 800 students and included a four-tiered dance company, an African dance group, and in-school artist residencies in Georgia and Alabama.

In 2009, faced with dwindling funding, McQueen took a leap: She closed her school and moved back to New York to pursue acting.

In addition to appearing in martial arts fight scenes, McQueen has performed as a stunt double for notables such as Lorraine Toussaint of Orange is the New Black and in several episodes of Law & Order. Her stunt work has included falling out of a two-story window, portraying a convict who gets “shanked” by a fellow felon, and spinning a car 360 degrees. “I’m a dancer,” she says. “I can do the moves, and I never say ‘I can’t.’”

She also has portrayed characters in the TV hits Limitless and Veep, as well as the movie The Bourne Legacy. In the next few months, she is scheduled to portray a taciturn crime scene investigator in a web series and to appear in a cinematic thriller titled Killer Response, starring Tom Sizemore and slated to open in 2017.

The performer, who has occasionally been heard to say, as though a mantra, “Faye will make a way,” is also in the early planning stages to found a third dance school. The nonprofit, which will be located in the New York area, will be dedicated to teaching dance to as many children as possible.

—Holly Selby