Alumni Profile - Olivia Boudreau (Kral)

Story appeared in the 2015 issue of QMS Connections Magazine.

BY LEANNE SCHULTZ, OPERATIONS & HR MANAGER
ALUMNI OLIVIA BOUDREAU (KRAL, 1987-1990)

I attended QMS from 1987 to 1990. After graduation in 1994, I went on to study at the University of Victoria. I started a career advertising with local media groups and launched my own promotional company specializing in product launches. In early 2007, my husband and I welcomed our daughter Kaiya into our lives and decided it was a time for a career change.

In 2008, I teamed up with my child-hood friend, Emily Clements, to start Adage Studio. Over the past seven years, we’ve grown from our original location at the Glenora Hall to our next location on Duncan Avenue, and finally to our new studio on Government Street. In this short amount of time, we have seen our past students carry on to pursue careers in the performing arts. Past students have been accepted to the Canadian College of Performing Arts, Brown University Dance Program, The Source Dance Company and most recently one of my past students has been performing as a back up dancer on the X-Factor UK.

We’ve grown our business from just the two of us to 17 employees. We offer classes for children starting at 18 months and carry on teaching students who are well into retirement. It has been great to see the joy of music and movement shared with such a vast range of students. Continuing education is extremely important to both Emily and I, and over the past few summers we have continued training from some of the industry’s top professionals in New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. In 2013, we were awarded a Black Tie Award from the Duncan Cowichan Chamber of Commerce for Business Achievement (11-19 Employee Category) and we were also nominated for the Vancouver Island Business Awards.

In 2012, Emily and I gathered some like-minded individuals together and started the Cowichan Valley Performing Arts Foundation, which fundraises and grants bursaries to help youth in the Cowichan Valley who are held back for financial rea-sons from pursuing their dream of studying the performing arts.