Leah Bailey

Leah is a contemporary ballet dancer, choreographer, and teaching artist from Raleigh, North Carolina in the School of Dance at Florida State University. My intent is to encourage movers to make ballet a more relevant, inclusive, and responsible art form. She received Bachelor’s of Arts in Dance from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and completed Charlotte Ballet’s (formerly North Carolina Dance Theater) Certificate in Professional Training program. As Ballet Mistress at the School of Evansville Ballet, Leah taught pre-professional students, led rehearsals, and performed soloist roles. Additionally, she worked with Kids Dance Outreach, a non-profit affiliate program of National Dance Institute, which brings dance and live music to public school students.

Currently, Leah Bailey is pursuing her Masters of Fine Arts in Dance as a Legacy Fellow at Florida State University. Through movement analysis and exploration, her intent is to encourage movers to make ballet a more relevant, inclusive, and responsible art form. Peppered with sculptural fragility and angularity, her work draws on the tension between ballet technique structure and artistic freedom. Intricate patterns, fragmentation, repetition, and suspension are recurrent tools in this exploration. Exaggerated, extended movement drives a delicate balance between linear pathway creation and divergence.

Leah’s lifelong interest revolves around reimagining approaches to ballet classwork and choreography in order to generate change through mindful embodied practice. Ballet has the potential to cultivate positive body awareness, strength, and movement autonomy among dancers.