Tag: Misty Danielle Copeland

Misty Danielle Copeland (born September 10, 1982) is an American ballet dancer for American Ballet Theatre (ABT), one of the three leading classical ballet companies in the United States. On June 30, 2015, Copeland became the first African American woman to be promoted to principal dancer in ABT’s 75-year history.Copeland was considered a prodigy who rose to stardom despite not starting ballet until the age of 13. Two years later, in 1998, her ballet teachers, who were serving as her custodial guardians, and her mother, fought a custody battle over her. Meanwhile, Copeland, who was already an award-winning dancer, was fielding professional offers. The legal issues involved filings for emancipation by Copeland and restraining orders by her mother. Both sides dropped legal proceedings, and Copeland moved home to begin studying under a new teacher, who was a former ABT member.In 1997, Copeland won the Los Angeles Music Center Spotlight Award as the best dancer in Southern California. After two summer workshops with ABT, she became a member of ABT’s Studio Company in 2000 and its corps de ballet in 2001, and became an ABT soloist in 2007. As a soloist from 2007 to mid-2015, she was described as having matured into a more contemporary and sophisticated dancer.In addition to her dance career, Copeland has become a public speaker, celebrity spokesperson and stage performer. She has written two autobiographical books and narrated a documentary about her career challenges, A Ballerina’s Tale. In 2015, she was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, appearing on its cover. She performed on Broadway in On the Town, toured as a featured dancer for Prince and appeared on the reality television shows A Day in the Life and So You Think You Can Dance. She has endorsed products and companies such as T-Mobile, Coach, Inc., Dr Pepper, Seiko, The Dannon Company and Under Armour.Copeland was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in the San Pedro community of Los Angeles, California. She is the youngest of Sylvia DelaCerna’s four children from her second marriage to Douglas Copland. Between the ages of three and seven Copeland lived in Bellflower, California, with her mother and her mother’s third husband Harold Brown, a Santa Fe Railroad sales executive. The family moved to San Pedro where Sylvia eventually married her fourth husband, radiologist Robert DelaCerna, and where Misty attended Point Fermin Elementary School. When she was seven, Copeland saw Nadia and gymnast Nadia Comăneci was her role model. At age eleven, she found her first creative outlet at a Boys & Girls Club wood shop class. Copeland never studied ballet or gymnastics formally until her teenage years. However, she did enjoy choreographing flips and dance moves to Mariah Carey songs in her youth. Following in the footsteps of her older sister Erica who had starred on the Dana Middle School drill team.Copeland’s natural presence and skill came to the attention of her classically trained Dana drill team coach, Elizabeth Cantine, in San Pedro. Cynthia Bradley, who was a friend of Cantine’s, first introduced her to ballet in classes at her local Boys & Girls Club. DelaCerna allowed Copeland to go to the club after school until the workday ended and Bradley, a former working dancer with companies in San Diego, Virginia and Kentucky, taught a free ballet class there once a week. Bradley invited Copeland to attend class at the small local ballet school, San Pedro Dance Center. Copeland began her ballet studies at the age of 13 at the San Pedro Dance Center when Cynthia Bradley began picking her up from school. During her first year of middle school the family left Robert. After living with various boyfriends of her mother, the family, moved to the Sunset Inn in Gardena, California. Soon, DelaCerna told Copeland that she would have to give up ballet. However, Bradley wanted Copeland to continue and offered to host her, to which DelaCerna agreed so Misty could pursue her dream. Eventually, they signed a management contract as well as a life-story contract. She spent the weekdays with the Bradleys near the coast and the weekends at home with her mother, a two-hour bus ride away. By the age of fourteen, Copeland was the winner of a national ballet contest and won her first solo role.Copeland is considered a prodigy. By age 15, Copeland’s mother and ballet teachers, who were serving as her custodial guardians, fought a custody battle over her. Meanwhile, Copeland, who was already an award-winning dancer, was fielding professional offers. The 1998 legal proceedings involved filings for emancipation by Copeland and restraining orders by her mother. Both sides dropped legal proceedings, and Copeland moved home to begin studying under a new teacher who was a former ABT member. In 1997, Copeland won the Los Angeles Music Center Spotlight Award as the best dancer in Southern California. After two summer workshops with the ABT, she became a member of the Studio Company in 2000, a member of the corps de ballet in 2001, and a soloist in 2007. Stylistically, she is considered a classical ballet dancer.As a soloist since 2007, she has been described as having matured into a more contemporary and sophisticated dancer. While aspiring to be a principal dancer, Copeland has numerous goals as a dancer, in terms of leading roles. She aspires to perform lead roles in Giselle, Nikiya and Gamzatti in La Bayadère, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet as well as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake. In 2011, she was featured in the Season 1, episode of the Hulu web series A Day in the Life. And she unveiled a line of dancewear that she designed. In 2012, The Council of Urban Professionals as the Council’s Breakthrough Leadership Award winner at its 5th Anniversary Leadership Gala recognized her. By late 2012, she was seeking publication of two books: a memoir and an illustrated youth book. Around this time, Copeland began achieving solo roles in full-length ballets rather than contemporary works.Copeland starred in The Firebird, with choreography by Alexei Ratmansky at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California. The Los Angeles Times Laura Bleiberg as one of the years hailed the performance best dance performances. The Firebird was again performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in June 2012. Within one week of her first and only performance in the role at the Metropolitan Opera, Copeland withdrew from the entire ABT season at the Met due to six stress fractures in her tibia. She was sidelined for seven months after her October 10 surgery. In 2013, she began working on two books: a memoir under the Simon & Schuster Touchstone Books label and a picture book for the G. P. Putnam’s Sons for Young Readers label. In September 2013, Copeland became a spokesperson for Project Plié, a national initiative with the goal of broadening the pipeline of leadership within ballet. Copeland was interviewed in the November 2013 Vogue Italia.In 2014 Copeland’s autobiography Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina was released. Copeland was named to the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition and became a guest judge for the 11th season of So You Think You Can Dance. In May 2014, she performed the lead role of Swanilda in Coppélia at the Metropolitan Opera House. In addition she performed the roles of a Shade and the Lead D’Jampe in La Bayadère alongside Herman Cornejo and Alina Cojucaru. Later in the year, she performed the Odette/Odile double role in Swan Lake on September 3 when the company toured in Brisbane, Australia. She would later perform Odette/Odile in New York City as well as her first Romeo and Juliet. She was a Dance Magazine Awards 2014 honoree. Copeland was selected for the 2015 Time 100. As a result, she appeared on the cover of Time, making her the first dancer to appear on the cover since Bill T. Jones made the cover in 1994. On June 30, 2015, Copeland became the first African-American woman to be promoted to principal dancer in ABT’s 75-year history. Although her achievement was groundbreaking, Arthur Mitchell is credited as the first dancer to break the color barrier as a principal dancer in 1962 and Desmond Richardson did so for ABT in 1997. On July 5, Copeland announced that she would take on the role of Ivy Smith in the Broadway revival of On The Town for two weeks from August 25 to September 6. On August 5, she was included in the International Best Dressed List, published by Vanity Fair. Her debut on broadway was favorably reviewed in The New York Times by Gia Kourlas,The Washington Post by Peter Marks, a review by Dave Quinn of WNBC, and The Hollywood Reporter by Frank Scheck.Copeland lives with her boyfriend, Olu Evans, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The couple had been introduced in 2004 by Evans cousin, Taye Diggs. In a cover story in the September 2015 issue of Essence Copeland announced her engagement to Evans.Copeland and her husband, attorney Olu Evans, live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The couple were introduced to each other around 2004 by Evans’ cousin, Taye Diggs, and disclosed their engagement in a 2015 cover story in Essence magazine. They married in California on July 31, 2016. Copeland enjoys cooking and prefers to avoid crowded places.

Written by Dianne Washington