🇺🇸 Misty Copeland

Biography

The letter arrived at American Ballet Theatre in 1997. It was written by the parents of thirteen young ballet students, and it made a simple argument: the girl they were writing about was not suitable for a professional ballet career. She had started too late. Her body type was wrong. She lacked the bone structure and the proportions that classical ballet demanded. The girl the letter described was Misty Copeland. In 2015, she became the first African American woman to be named principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre — the company whose very standards the letter had invoked against her.

Copeland was born September 10, 1982, in Kansas City, Missouri. Her childhood was marked by instability — her mother married six times, and the family moved frequently, often struggling financially. Copeland grew up in a motel in San Pedro, California, sharing a single room with her mother and five siblings. She had no exposure to ballet, no family tradition of classical arts, no access to the training that typically begins before a child can read. She first took a ballet class at thirteen, through a free program at a Boys & Girls Club taught by Cynthia Bradley.

What Bradley saw in Copeland's first class was so extraordinary that she offered to pay for private lessons and eventually invited the teenager to live with her family. Copeland's body — compact, muscular, naturally rhythmic — absorbed the technical demands of ballet with a speed that her teacher had never seen before. Within three months she was en pointe. Within a year she was performing professionally at local competitions. Within three years she had won the Los Angeles Music Center's Spotlight Awards. Her rise was so fast it seemed to bend the laws of what classical training required.

At eighteen, she joined the Studio Company of American Ballet Theatre, and in 2001 joined the main company as a member of the corps de ballet. The progression from corps to soloist to principal at ABT is one of the most competitive in the performing arts — hundreds of dancers compete for a handful of positions, and promotion can take decades or never come at all. Copeland made soloist in 2007, one of only a handful of Black dancers to reach that level in the company's history. She made principal in 2015, a moment that received international news coverage and was celebrated far beyond the world of ballet.

Her dancing is characterized by exceptional musicality, powerful extensions, and a dramatic expressiveness that translates equally well in the intimate theatrical roles of Giselle and the technically demanding showcase of Swan Lake. She has performed Juliet, Firebird, and Odette/Odile — the dual white and black swan roles in Swan Lake that are considered the supreme test of a classical ballerina — to unanimous critical praise. Her Firebird in particular has been called one of the great performances in ABT's history.

Outside the studio and the stage, Copeland has been an unusually vocal and effective advocate for diversity in classical dance. Her memoir Life in Motion (2014) became a New York Times bestseller and introduced her story to readers who had never attended a ballet performance. Her children's book Bunheads (2020) is designed specifically to show young readers of color that classical dance is available to them. Her partnership with Under Armour produced one of the most-watched sports advertisements of the 2010s — a video in which a voiceover reads a rejection letter as Copeland dances, with precision and power, across the screen.

In 2018, she was appointed to the President's Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition. She has been named to Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People list and has received honorary doctorates from multiple universities. She continues to perform with ABT and to maintain a public role as a speaker, author, and advocate for arts education and access.

Timeline

Peers in Perspective