One month into her tenure at Bloomingdale, Rachel Black reflects on the music, mentors, communities, and creative experiences that shaped her path to arts leadership.
In her first month as Executive Director of Bloomingdale School of Music, Rachel Black has wasted no time jumping in. She’s played ukulele with the Summer Troubadours, sat down with staff to dream and plan for the fall, emceed the Summer Sharing Hour, and introduced her goldendoodle, Hattie, to the office, where she was, unsurprisingly, an immediate hit.
But Rachel hasn’t just been learning how Bloomingdale works. She’s been getting to know the people who make it what it is. That matters to her. Because long before she became an arts administrator, music gave Rachel some of the communities that shaped her life.
Finding Community Through Music
Growing up in Mississippi, she sang in children’s choirs and played handbells at church. She picked up the alto saxophone and joined her public school’s marching band, then moved on to bari sax and contrabass clarinet in symphonic band. “In the South, the marching band culture is really important,” she remembers. “And there’s a great sense of community for the students who participate. We loved the performance aspect of it, and were obsessed with the competitions. We even had letterman jackets!”
At the University of Southern Mississippi, that sense of belonging grew even bigger. Rachel sang in massive choral performances of the requiems of Benjamin Britten and Johannes Brahms, joining music majors from across the university, a one hundred-person community chorus, and a full orchestra. “Those were some of the biggest things I had ever done at that point in my life, and I remember feeling so powerful, so open,” she says. “I’m such a choir nerd still to this day. I love singing in choirs because of the feeling it gives you and the connection you feel to everybody who’s standing with you. I never tire of that beautiful way in which your heart sort of breaks open when you sing with others. It’s why I still sing in my church choir.”
From Music to the Stage
Music opened Rachel’s heart. It also opened a door.
Through music, she found theater, which became, in her words, “a safe and creative space, a place for me to be myself.” Teachers and mentors saw something in her and helped her see it, too. Their encouragement eventually carried her from Mississippi to San Francisco, where she earned her MFA at the American Conservatory Theater, and then across the country again to New York City to pursue acting professionally.
For twelve years, Rachel lived the unpredictable life of a working actor. There were extraordinary moments, including working alongside Christopher Plummer and Tilda Swinton and performing Off-Broadway. There were also temp jobs, countless auditions, plenty of rejection, and the daily discipline of showing up again. She learned how to “dust myself off and get back in the ring the next day.”
That resilience would shape the next chapter of her life.
A New Path in Arts Leadership
Rachel began temping at City Parks Foundation, a nonprofit bringing performing arts programs into parks across New York City. A job that initially helped support her acting career became a career of its own. Rachel kept learning, taking on new responsibilities, and discovering that the skills she had honed as a performer translated powerfully into leadership. Eventually, she became General Manager of Central Park SummerStage.
“Even while pursuing an acting career,” she says, “I was learning all these great leadership skills in arts administration. And that’s how I landed here.”
Here is Bloomingdale. And in many ways, arriving at a music school feels less like leaving one career for another than bringing the pieces of Rachel’s life together.
Rachel Black on the Power of Music Education
She knows firsthand what can happen when a young person walks into a creative space and finds a teacher who believes in them. She knows the confidence that grows through practice, the courage it takes to try and fail and try again, and the particular joy of making something alongside other people.
That’s what she wants Bloomingdale’s students to find here. “I want every person who walks through our doors to feel possibility,” Rachel says. “I want them to know: I can be fully myself here. I can be brave enough to try something I’ve never tried before. I can struggle, practice, fail, begin again, and discover that I’m capable of more than I knew. And I don’t have to do any of it alone. There are teachers and fellow musicians here who will challenge me, believe in me, and celebrate with me as I grow. That’s the power of music education. You come here to learn an instrument, but along the way, you learn something about who you are and who you might become.”
Building What Comes Next
These days, Rachel thinks of her own role a little differently. She’s no longer the student at the center of the lesson or the performer stepping into the spotlight. She gets to help make those experiences possible for someone else.
“I’ve become part of the scaffolding,” she says, “to help build up the foundation of someone else’s learning and experience. It’s incredibly rewarding.” And she has already noticed something important about Bloomingdale: she’s surrounded by people who feel the same way. “The people who work here, they know the impact that this kind of work has, and they’re all deeply committed to it,” she says. That commitment extends beyond the staff to the parents, students, concertgoers, neighbors, and community members who keep showing up for this place.
Rachel is still getting to know Bloomingdale. Bloomingdale is still getting to know Rachel. But a month in, there’s already a shared language emerging: creativity, resilience, possibility, belonging, and the conviction that learning music can shape far more than the way a person plays or sings.
It can help someone discover who they are. Rachel knows because it happened to her. Now she gets to help make sure it happens for someone else.