OUR STORY
Returning home to the world of ballet
The Ballet Salon is a semi-professional contemporary ballet company designed for dancers returning to ballet in search of artistic expression, joyful community, and the inspiration that comes from collective movement. The Ballet Salon was founded in 2025 by Meiying Thai and Adriana Gramly, two ballet dancers-turned visual artists who connected through a shared passion for dance, art, and community building.
Our story begins in Brooklyn, where we met, by fate, at the barre in an open ballet class: Adriana, a lover of graceful lines and slow adagios, Meiying, a jumper with a passion for waltzing. We were excited to discover that we are both visual artists and bonded by our similar career paths, we soon became friends, colleagues and collaborators. Ultimately for both of us, ballet was always much more than a childhood activity. Ballet had shaped our identities and left a profound impact on our lives as a creative practice, an artistic calling, and a home away from home we both dreamed of returning to.
The Ballet Salon was born from this shared dream, and when we launched in 2025, we were amazed to discover so many other dancers, returning to ballet in adulthood, who were also yearning for far more than a drop-in class. Our first season began in March 2026 and we're just getting started...
First open house for The Ballet Salon, December 2025
Season I. Studio Showing,
August 2026
OUR PHILOSOPHY
Ballet as a lifelong art practice
We see the act of returning to ballet as a return to oneself. To return to dance is to return to both a first love and a first language. We created The Ballet Salon as a space to come home to dancing with a shared and supportive community. With the Ballet Salon, we also hope to challenge the belief that a dancer’s practice must end when her true adult life is perhaps only just beginning. We believe in the beauty of being multifaceted and are interested in dancers with rich life experiences, diverse careers, and even those who have overcome obstacles in order to return to ballet. We hope to challenge the limitations and stigma that are often felt by “former” dancers– you may have taken time away from the barre, but we truly believe you never stopped being an artist.
Adriana Gramly
Storyteller, visual artist, and co-founder of The Ballet Salon
Adriana is a Bolivian-American dancer and artist who received her ballet training with the Lawrence Ballet Theatre in Kansas. She received her fine arts education at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was a company member of Fusion Dance Company, Brown University’s oldest student-run dance company. After earning a double BFA in Film/Animations and Textiles, she moved to New York where she works as a multidisciplinary storyteller and teaching artist, creating work inspired by childhood play and folklore. She was a Textile Arts Center Artist in Residence in 2021, and has a diverse background in community arts and nonprofit work. She also works in film and animation, with clients including Saturday Night Live.
Meiying Thai
Multidisciplinary artist, teacher, and co-founder of The Ballet Salon
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Meiying is a Vietnamese-American dancer and artist. She trained for seven years at the School of American Ballet where she spent her childhood performing numerous children’s roles with the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center. After pivoting to the visual arts, she earned a BFA in General Fine Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art where she studied drawing, painting, and photography. She later returned to dance through her curatorial project, Cafe Telephone (active from 2015–2021), which brought global dancers and visual artists together to create collaborative projects that ranged from pop-up happenings to public film screenings. Meiying has worked in some of New York’s leading art galleries and her current work as both a multidisciplinary visual artist and educator examines how artistic collaboration can cultivate human connection and inspire community building.
