Gracein motion...

She asked
to dance...

On September 16, 2017, Grace arrived at her first ballet class in a blue leotard, holding her father’s hand. She was there because she had asked to dance. Her mother, a former professional ballerina, watched from the doorway with wonder. Grace’s first teacher had once taught her mother, too.

For Grace, that first request became afternoons at Berrend Dance Centre. Her teachers helped her understand that wanting to dance was only the beginning. A correction could send her back to a movement she thought she knew. The next day, she would come in and work on it again. In 2020, she took part in a virtual American Ballet Theatre summer intensive. Later, YAGP competitions gave her opportunities to take that work onstage.

During a summer of training in New York in 2022, Grace began to picture a future beyond her next class or performance. “I just knew then that I wanted to become a professional dancer,” she recalls. That realization eventually asked more of her than another summer away.

At fifteen, Grace left Maryland to live and train in New York at American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School. Ballet was no longer something she went to after school. It shaped her days and the place she called home.

Grace is living the life she imagined that summer. The little girl who asked for her first ballet class had chosen to build her days around dancing. She keeps making that choice each time she enters the studio.