Derek Reid

Once he saw The Wiz on Broadway in 1976, Derek Reid knew his future. "I was totally fascinated with the spectacle and the music," he says. "That's what I wanted to do."

Within three weeks after returning home to Columbia, Md., Reid's mother had enrolled him in a ballet class in Washington, D.C., that a Wiz cast member had attended.

He was 10. At 17, Reid was at Butler, working toward his bachelor's in dance. After graduation, he joined the Louisville Ballet, hoping eventually to get to New York. Two years later, when Dance Theatre of Harlem came through Louisville and held auditions, he had his wish. "I had a lot of experience," he says, "so there wasn't a fear to use me. I actually moved up rather quickly, from just being a masked creature in the back of Firebird Ballet to doing some duets and feature roles in less than a year's time."

But Dance Theatre of Harlem was hit with a six-month layoff, and Reid moved on, first to the Pennsylvania Ballet, then Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal. He found the company's mix of contemporary and European works, as well as the chance to work with up-and-coming choreographers, appealing.

"It was so much more natural to me than the formality of classical ballet," Reid says. "It was the perfect fit for me."

During eight years in Montreal, he met his wife, Jennifer, who was a dancer, and they had Hannah, the first of their two daughters. (Olivia is their younger girl.) The Reids moved back to the States in 1998. Derek got a job with Ballet Met Columbus (Ohio); Jennifer went to work as a financial consultant with her father and brother in Fort Wayne. After two years in separate cities, Derek moved to Fort Wayne and taught high school and middle school students at the Fort Wayne Ballet.

When the position at Butler opened in 2004, he jumped at the chance to teach "maturing young artists."

"I loved Butler when I was here as a student," the assistant professor of dance says. "I feel good about being back."