Margene Banks Conde
"Miss Margene"
Creative Classroom Founder / Owner
Dance & Musical Theatre Artistic Director / Choreographer
Preschool & Dance Teacher
Margene Conde graduated from the University of Utah where she studied both Modern Dance and Early Child Development. She was the recipient of the prestigious Elizabeth R. Hayes Scholarship.
Miss Margene has owned and directed a Modern Dance Studio, which produces bi-annual dance concerts, a Musical Theatre Company and an Educational Pre-school since 1976. She has choreographed for many community theaters in Utah over the past 20 years, including West Valley City, West Jordan City, Murray City, and Taylorsville City. Her repertoire includes “The Nutcracker”, a unique Modern Dance interpretation of this Holiday Classic that gives many children the opportunity to dance. This has been produced for fifteen years by her own Dance Company and co-sponsored by the West Valley City Arts Council.
Other productions include Twelve Dancing Princesses, Promised Valley, South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story, Music Man, Dude Ranch, Cinderella, Oklahoma, Fiddler On The Roof, Bye, Bye, Birdie, The King and I, The Sound Of Music, Brigadoon, Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, Carousel, Peter Pan, and Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat. Members of Miss Margene’s Creative Generation Dance Company danced in the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, participating in both the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, Olympic Village, Olympic Square Parades and Street Shows. These talented dancers and singers have performed and toured all over the United States, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Disneyland and Disney World, Nashville, Branson, Las Vegas, Oahu and Maui, Hawaii, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Margene served on the West Valley City Arts Council from 1992 to 2006 as the dance and theater specialist. She served as co-chair for two years and also served as chairman for two of those years. In 1992 Miss Margene received the George Washington Gold Medal of Honor from the Freedoms Foundations at Valley Forge for her accomplishments with children. In the year 2000, Mayor Gearld L. Wright of West Valley City awarded Miss Margene with the “Mayor’s Citation of Excellence” Award for a decade of service and fostering the Arts in West Valley City. Her groups have been featured on ABC4 for the Community News Segment “A Person you can Count On”, KSLTV5 “Arts in West Valley City” and FOX13KSTU “Big Buddha” Cool School of the Week.
Miss Margene is married to Kevin Conde and they are the proud parents of three accomplished children and grandparents of eleven grandchildren. She devotes her life to enriching the lives of our youth through positive teaching experiences, through performance opportunities as well as supporting all other cultural art forms. Many of Miss Margene’s students in dance and music have become accomplished dancers, actors and dance scholarship recipients at Utah universities going on to get their BA in dance from those institutions.
For the past 34 years, Miss Margene’s has had an average enrollment of 300 students per year taking 1 or more of the classes offered. Over 10,000 children’s lives have been touched by the “Magic of Miss Margene”.