TAPinto New Brunswick's People to Watch in 2024: Jason Geary

Jason Geary taught himself to play piano in the sixth grade on a spinet he inherited from his grandmother. It was nothing – even with supportive parents – compared to navigating a path toward his dream of being a concert pianist.

So, he’s intent on using his role as dean at Mason Gross School of the Arts to forge those pathways and form support systems for emerging art students.

Geary continues to champion initiatives such as the portfolio development program, in which students, faculty and staff members at Mason Gross work closely with advanced students in visual art at New Brunswick High School, as a way to help the next generation of young artists who are considering studying art beyond high school.

“In other words, this collection of work that they have to present to any school that they might be interested in attending, helping them understand what goes into making a successful portfolio and what are the sorts of things that you need to be thinking about both with respect to your artistic profile but also just in terms of being ready for college, taking up the applications process, all these sorts of things,” Geary said.

It’s these sort of programs and his commitment to the student experience that has fueled the first three and a half years on the job for Geary, one of TAPinto New Brunswick’s People to Watch in 2024.

His tenure since taking the position July 1, 2020 has been impacted by outside forces no one could have seen coming, including the first faculty strike in Rutgers history, a racial reckoning across campus in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I do feel like that year in particular, that Zero Year, was tough,” he said. “A lot of time and energy was spent on just thinking about how we react to and respond to the challenges on the ground. There’s no doubt that has an impact on you, the extent to which you’re able to kind of hit the ground running and get to really know the community.”

It didn’t take him long, however, to put his imprint on Mason Gross, a school of 1,024 emerging dancers, filmmakers, musicians, theater artists, visual artists and designers that is dedicated to the values of inclusive excellence, collaboration and community.

Last year, the school launched a first-year, interdisciplinary collaborative course called Mason Gross Interplay. Geary said it brings students from each of the five departments at Mason Gross (music, theater, dance, filmmaking and art and design) together to collaborate on a project.

“They’re both gaining skills around what it means to be an effective collaborator, but also they’re gaining some insight into the different aspects of creativity and the artistry they might not be exposed to,” he said.

Geary said he sometimes stops and reflects on the path it took to get here, from that musical prodigy growing up in Bakersfield, Calif., to the undergraduate at San Francisco Conservatory of Music who decided to dedicate his life to musicology, to the administrator who enjoyed successful stints at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance and the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland. 

The year 2024 is coming in more like a cacophonous concerto than a benign berceuse, with so many projects on the table.

Geary is excited about the continued cutting-edge work being produced through the Arts in Health Research Lab that began last summer through a collaboration between the Mason Gross School of the Arts’ School of Public Health and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

“The idea there is to begin to quantify and better understand the extent to which the arts contribute to health and well-being,” he said. “So, we want to document that. And hopefully, leading up to what’s often referred to as the social prescribing of the arts, wherein, as a way of contributing to health and wellness, a medical professional might actually prescribe an arts experience of some kind because it’s been shown that the arts are one of the social determinants of health.”