🇺🇸 Maddie Ziegler

Maddie Ziegler was born on September 30, 2002, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Melissa Ziegler-Gisoni and Kurt Ziegler. She began dance training, at her mother's recognition of her interest, at age two. By eight, she was the lead in her dance studio's competition team, and the studio's owner Abby Lee Miller had identified her as the strongest technician of her age cohort she had ever trained.

The reality-television series Dance Moms began airing on Lifetime in 2011. Maddie became the show's principal child star, appearing in nearly every episode for its eight seasons. Her technical dance ability — across multiple styles, with a level of physical control that adult professional dance critics described as preternatural — was the engine of the show. Her presence on Dance Moms made her, by 2014, one of the most-recognised child dancers in the United States.

The collaboration with Sia began in 2014. Sia, who had been writing for major pop artists for years and had decided to release her own album, was looking for a visual identity that would let her perform anonymously. Maddie Ziegler — fully visible in the music video, dancing the choreography, embodying the song's emotional content — became Sia's de facto avatar. The arrangement was unusual: Sia would sing the songs; Maddie would perform the visual interpretation. The five subsequent music videos in the partnership accumulated, cumulatively, billions of YouTube views.

The Chandelier video itself, when it ran on YouTube and on television, brought interpretive contemporary dance to a global audience that had not previously been engaging with the genre. The performance was nominated for multiple music-video awards. Maddie performed the choreography live at the Grammy Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards, the American Music Awards, and on Saturday Night Live with Kristen Wiig in the choreography role's adult version.

Her subsequent career has expanded into acting and authorship. She has played significant roles in films including "The Book of Henry," "Music" (directed by Sia herself), and "West Side Story." She has authored a young-adult novel. She has continued to take selected dance projects. The transition from child-dance star to adult professional performing artist has been managed with notable care; she has avoided the heavy commercial-exploitation trap that often closes off such careers in their late teens.

Maddie Ziegler's case is the most-documented contemporary example of a child dancer whose career achieved global mass-audience recognition before adolescence and then continued successfully into adulthood. The Sia collaboration alone has produced one of the most-watched music-video corpuses in YouTube history. The continuing career — film acting, dance, authorship — is the kind of multi-disciplinary professional life that most child performing artists do not achieve. The Ziegler family's careful management, in particular her mother Melissa's deliberate restraint on extreme commercial exploitation, has been studied in performing-arts industry literature as a contemporary model.