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Description
Caitlyn Gee (She/Hers) was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1999. She grew up in Memphis and moved to Indiana to study at the Indiana Ballet Conservatory with her mentor. She attended Carmel High School and her sophomore year St. Mary’s Episcopal School. During the first semester of her junior year, she decided to study dance abroad, in Marbella, Spain, for the first half of the school year. After her first semester, she returned to Indiana, attended Laurel Springs School, and finished her high school degree online. After graduating from high school, she decided to take a gap year to join Hubbard Dance Street Chicago in their Professional Program and began interning at the Buckman Theatre. After living in Chicago for a little while, she decided to apply to Columbia College Chicago for Arts Management in order to stay active in the management side of the dance community. During her freshman year in college, she worked as the Children’s Dance Director at the Woman’s Athletic Club and as a Special Events Intern at the Lyric Opera. After Coronavirus caused the school to switch to online learning, she moved back in with her parents for a month and a half to quarantine before moving back to her Chicago apartment. Currently she is doing school remotely and is working as a campus ambassador at Columbia College Chicago. She is expected to graduate in 2023.
Publication Date
Fall 2020
Publisher
Columbia College Chicago
City
Chicago
Keywords
COVID-19, pandemic, Chicago, Illinois, United States, coronavirus
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Oral History | Public History | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recommended Citation
Dynes, Elliot, "Interview with Caity Gee" (2020). Capturing Quarantine Oral Histories. 28.
https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/capturingquarantine/28
Comments
Caity Gee takes the audience through themes of isolation, self care, remote learning, traveling abroad, and Black Lives Matter. She describes several phases of her life and talks about interesting events she experienced. Caity grew up in Memphis, Tennessee with her mother and father, both from Memphis. She describes her unusual high school experience moving between different high schools and studying abroad in Marbella, Spain. and returning to Indiana to finish high school online in order to study at the Indiana Ballet Conservatory.
During her gap and first year at Columbia College Chicago, she recalls joining Hubbard Dance Street Chicago, interning at the Buckman Theatre, working as the Children’s Dance Director at the Woman’s Athletic Club, and as a Special Events Intern at the Lyric Opera.
She recounts moving back home with her parents after not living with them for a long time and returning to her Chicago apartment after a month and a half of lockdown. A defining characteristic of Covid for Caity was adjusting to having fewer things on her plate after being so used to having a packed schedule. During the Black Lives Matter movement, she described what it was like living in Chicago while protests with thousands of people were going on and what the movement meant to her as a person of color.She then describes how the transition to online school was for her during the fall 2020 semester at Columbia.
Caity ends the interview with different ways staying mentally healthy has helped her through hard times such as corona; “Depression is thinking about the past and anxiety is thinking about the future and the way to not really have either of those is to live in the present”.
Conducted in fall 2020 by an Oral History: The Art of the Interview student, this interview with a fellow student in the class reflects on the pandemic and how it impacted their life. The interview is conducted based on the life history approach to oral history.