In honor of Women's History Month, the Library is taking a look back at some of the remarkable women who changed The New York Public Library—and the field of librarianship—forever with our new series, Foreword: Women Who Built NYPL. Each week this March, we will be sharing reflections from our current staff on how the impact of these trailblazing figures from the Library's 125-year history are still felt today. 

About Genevieve Oswald 

Genevieve Oswald (known as "Gegi") was the founding curator of the dance collection (now named the Jerome Robbins Dance Division) at the Library for the Performing Arts, and its leader for 43 years. Thanks to Oswald's visionary leadership, and unapologetic insistence that dance was a legitimate field of academic study, the Dance Division now houses the largest collection of dance materials anywhere in the world. During her tenure as curator Oswald was a vibrant part of America's dance scene, quietly providing artists with critical support. When Alvin Ailey's company was on the verge of closure due to financial difficulties, Oswald called with an offer to film the company's entire repertory, a move that helped Ailey to refinance his enterprise. She was also a global figure, deeply respected in dance circles for her knowledge of the field and archival expertise, and she spent a significant portion of time in Asia providing guidance on the establishment of local archives in India and Malaysia. In addition to her work as the curator of the Dance Division, Oswald also initiated the first undergraduate course in dance history at New York University with noted scholar, Selma Jeanne Cohen.

Genevieve Oswald's Legacy

Reflections by Linda Murray, Curator for the Jerome Robbins Dance Division

When I took over the job of Dance Curator for the Library for the Performing Arts, I was immensely fortunate that all four women who had preceded me in the role were still living and that I got the opportunity to develop personal relationships with each of them. In particular, I had the privilege of becoming friends with Genevieve Oswald (forever and lovingly called Gegi in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division). 

I first met Gegi at her home in Santa Clarita, California, when she was 94 years old. What I had expected would be a short visit to pay my respects turned into a five-hour conversation over lunch about the Dance Division that she had built, her philosophy for collecting dance materials and providing service to the dance field, and her aspirations for the Division’s future. Gegi lived a very full life outside of her work for the Library, but even 30 years after her retirement (she left NYPL in 1987), it was evident that her heart was the Dance Division. In that first encounter, I immediately understood that she and I were now forever bound by the same vocation—that her work was mine, and that her legacy was in my hands to safeguard and protect. It may have looked like lunch, but she was really assessing me to see if I was up to the job.

The impact of Gegi’s 43 years at the Library continue to resonate in our daily work in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Archival acquisitions are often the efforts of multiple generations of curators, and I still reap the benefits of the relationships that Gegi cultivated with different dance communities. Beloved projects that received seed money under her watch—including the Dance Division's Original Documentation program and the Oral History Project, which began in 1967 and 1974, respectively—continue to be considered by the dance field as essential services. 

However, her most indelible mark is less tangible, but immediately recognizable when you engage with Dance Division staff. Over the course of her career, Gegi sought out intelligent dancers and engaged them in library work, turning many into qualified librarians as the years went by. She instilled in her staff a fierce passion for dance archiving and demanded excellence in the most mundane of tasks. That devotion, which she exhibited daily, is still present in the Division that she shaped and embodied in the staff who inherited her energy and purpose. Gegi was our first, our original, and how lucky were we to be molded by such an iconic force? There was no one like her.