He described himself as "a Renaissance man" and said he had found a perfect home at Northwest School of the Arts.

"There is such life, such creativity in this place," Barry Bowe said recently, shortly before he and guests watched his students perform a play.

Now, students, staff and parents are dealing with the news that Bowe, the 54-year-old principal at Northwest, died Monday at his home in Huntersville. There is no word as to the cause of death.

Bowe came to Charlotte in 2008 after spending nearly three decades as a teacher and administrator in West Virginia and central Pennsylvania. He was a computer geek, a journalist, and he enjoyed working with special needs students. But at heart, he was an artist.

He was founding manager of Arts Alive: The Best of West Virginia, an arts festival in the Charleston area. In the late 1990s, he became principal at Chandler Elementary School in Charleston. It was West Virginia's first performing arts magnet school.

Bowe was the successor at Northwest to longtime principal Charles LaBorde, who headed the school as it developed award-winning programs in dance, drama and music. "He's a perfect fit," one Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools administrator said of Bowe when he was hired to replace LaBorde nearly four years ago.

Bowe earned his associate degree from Chowan College and his bachelors from Virginia Intermont College in Bristol. He later received a masters from Marshall University and a doctorate in 2005 from Nova Southeastern University.

His first teaching job was in 1979, at East Bank High School in Kanawha County, W.Va. Bowe's first stint as a principal was in 1991, at Belle Elementary School in the Charleston area. He later won Principal of the Year honors in Kanawha County in 2000 at Chandler Elementary, spent about five years as an administrator in central Pennsylavania, and returned to the Charleston area in 2006.

Bowe was interim superintendent in 2006 in Wingate, Pa.