Still Steppin’ After All These Years
Meghan Kelly was only 22 years old when she founded The Kelly School of Irish Dance. Today it is the largest accredited Irish dance school in Rhode Island and home to some of the best Irish dancers in New England. Kelly is also a 2006 graduate of Rhode Island College.
“‘I’m Meghan Kelly, and I’m 100 percent Irish.’ That’s how I tend to introduce myself,” says Kelly. “All of my grandparents were either born in Ireland or were first generation, and I’ve always been very connected to my culture and identity.”
Kelly began taking Irish dance lessons at the age of six, upon the insistence of her grandfather.
“It was definitely a hard sell for a little girl who wanted to do ballet,” she says, “but I fell in love with it the first day.”
Her grandfather would die two years later, “but I remember dancing for him in the hospital,” she says. “He would always say, ‘You’re going to be a championship dancer someday.’”
And so she was.
Kelly danced competitively until the age of 14. In her senior year at RIC, where she majored in anthropology and speech communication, she began her fledgling school – teaching Irish dance at a local Irish club.
Her double major actually complemented her passion for Irish dance. Anthropology is the study of human societies and cultures, and Irish folk dance is rooted in ancient Celtic culture. In performing and teaching this art form, Kelly was already a practicing cultural anthropologist.
Her interests also lie in linguistic anthropology. “Dance is not an oral language, but it is a language,” she says. “I’m interested in preserving cultural expressions like dance and language so that they are not lost.”
“I think it’s amazing,” she observes, “that Irish dance still exists despite famine, migration, colonization and civil unrest. Despite all this, the dance and the music remain strong and keep evolving.”
Not long after earning dual degrees at RIC, Kelly decided to forego graduate school in ethno-choreography or audiology because the seedling of the school she had started at the Irish club in 2006 had grown exponentially. She made the decision to open her own school – The Kelly School of Irish Dance. It was 2011 and she had 240 students.
Today, Kelly offers Irish dance classes in Coventry, Bristol, Cranston and Providence. Enrollees come from as far away as Southeastern Massachusetts and Connecticut. Her dancers range from the littlest beginners to world champion-level performers, and they perform and compete throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, Germany, England, Scotland, and, of course, Ireland.
In 2022, in recognition of her excellence in teaching, Kelly, along with her sister Kathleen, were honored with the Global Irish Dance Teaching Award.
Kelly says she hopes to live in Ireland someday: “Like my grandparents and great grandparents before me, my heart is in Ireland. It’s nice to know that I can find my way back. In the meantime, I get to have a lifestyle that takes me there often and that leads others there, too.”
When asked what Irish dance has given her personally, she pauses. “It always takes me back to being that little kid dancing for her family to make them proud.”
In 2026 the Kelly School of Irish Dance will be 20 years old.