Ella Baff Takes Her Leave Of the Pillow

She’s a familiar sight at Jacob’s Pillow, greeting audiences and then, finishing her intro with the words, “let’s dance,” she swirls away behind the curtain. 

 Now, after 17 years at Jacob’s Pillow, Ella Baff is leaving for a new job at the Mellon Foundation, leaving behind a long list of accomplishments. As executive and artistic director she created a facilities plan for the 225-acre, woodsy campus off George Carter Road in Becket, MA. And she stabilized the Pillow’s once-fragile finances with cash reserves and an endowment. 

She expanded the school, added hundreds of free events each summer, and encouraged audiences to be more adventurous and buy tickets not only for established names like Paul Taylor and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane, but for groups presenting everything from traditional Indian dance to Brazilian hip-hop to Japanese dancing robots. In fact many of today’s big names in dance got that way because Baff discovered or promoted them, gave them residencies to create new work and then premièred the work at the Pillow. And she has featured many female choreographers in a field dominated by men.  

Baff was recruited for a senior position at the Mellon Foundation, which has more than $6 billion in assets. Baff acknowledges that going from a position in which she was always raising money to one in which she gets to give it away “is a relief.” The relentless financial pressure of a not for profit is a heavy load.

Her title will be senior program officer for arts and cultural heritage, which means she’ll be both granting funds and developing new initiatives and collaborations. If that sounds vague it’s because the position is new, created for her, and she’ll be defining it as she goes along.

In a way, she says, the breadth of the job is a throwback to her pre-Pillow career, running a large performing arts center at UC Berkeley in California.  “We had six stages,” she recalls. “I programmed everything from rock ’n’ roll to theater and dance of all kinds.” 

Among the accomplishments she’s proudest of during her tenure is the the Jacob’s Pillow Award, created with the help of two anonymous donors.

“It allows us to give an exceptional artist a $25,000 gift, no strings attached. The people who have received the award have increased recognition afterward --— Crystal Pite, Michelle Dorrance, Kyle Abraham. Kyle then won a MacArthur Award a year or so later.  John Heginbotham, Liz Gerring this year. It’s been a great leveraging source for the artists who have received the award. I’m very happy about that.”

Another highlight was meeting President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama when the Pillow received the National Medal of Arts in Washington.

But in a place like the Pillow, there’s a surprise pretty much on a daily basis, she says, ranging from the worrisome, such as dancers being injured, or raging thunderstorms to premières that didn’t end up looking very much like how they had started, and then there are people who take astonishing leaps forward in their artistic development.  

“It’s like running a village,” Baff says. 

She offers some advice to whoever may take her place: “Make sure to pay eagle-eye attention to what is immediately in front of you, which is sometimes urgent; watch out a little bit ahead for the medium term; get some goals and hop to it. But most important of all is live in the future because that’s where the vision is.” 

Baff and her husband are keeping their home in Otis, MA, and she says she’s looking forward to visiting the Pillow as a patron. 

“I’m very emotional. I’m excited about what I’m doing, but after devoting 17 years to the Pillow I’ll miss the colleagues and friends. These relationships are very deep ones.”