Gillian Murphy, American Repertory Ballet’s artistic associate, will teach a special ballet master class at Princeton Ballet School on Sunday, March 29 from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Murphy recently retired from her 29-year performance career with American Ballet Theatre (ABT). Her repertoire included leading roles in ABT’s full-length classics and in shorter works by choreographers of the past and present. Murphy danced a broad scope of styles and characters, including the title heroines in Cinderella, Giselle, La Bayadere, La Fille Mal Gardeé, Raymonda, The Sleeping Beauty, Sylvia, and Woolf Works.
Raised in Florence, S.C., Murphy was a member of Columbia City Ballet before attending high school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA). As a teenager, Murphy was awarded the Prix de Lausanne Espoir, and she joined American Ballet Theatre in 1996. After being honored with a Princess Grace Foundation Award, Murphy was promoted to Soloist in 1999 and to Principal Dancer in 2002. She starred as Odette/Odile in ABT’s PBS television production of Swan Lake.
Murphy has danced as a guest artist with the Mariinsky Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet, the Staatsballett Berlin, the Kiev Ballet, the Australian Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, and in numerous other international engagements and galas. She starred onstage in world premieres of new creations by Alexei Ratmansky, Mark Morris, Benjamin Millepied, Michelle Dorrance, Jorma Elo, Jessica Lang, Marcelo Gomes, James Whiteside, Aszure Barton, Peter Quanz, Natalie Weir, John Neumeier, Robert Hill, Christopher Wheeldon, Ethan Stiefel, and Twyla Tharp.
In 2018, Murphy graduated summa cum laude from St. Mary’s College of California with a Bachelor of Arts. In 2019, she completed the Harvard Business School’s “Crossover into Business” program and served on the international jury panel of the Prix de Lausanne.
The master class is open to all dancers ages 15-24, and Princeton Ballet School students levels 5 through trainees. Visit arballet.org for more information.