ABOUT THE BALLET SALON
Key Pillars of Our Programming
A community for ex ballet dancers
Weekly company ballet class taught by professional ballet dancers
Monthly salons featuring guest speakers who began in ballet and pivoted
Collaborating on original choreography created by working choreographers in NYC
A company show in October 2026
The Ballet Salon is a semi-professional contemporary ballet company that features artists who are returning to ballet later in their lives as a creative practice of joy, passion, and personal expression. 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. The Ballet Salon is a place for all of us to come home to dancing with a shared and supportive community.
The Ballet Salon is also interested in cultivating a company of dancers who are thinking of their return to ballet as a full and thoughtful creative practice. The structure of our program will include professionally-taught weekly company classes as well as monthly company salons that will be a shared space for inspiration, curiosity, creativity, and conversation. Each monthly salon will feature a guest speaker working in a ballet or dance-related field (such as writing, performance, or choreography). Our speakers will lead a talk and discussion with our directors offering a unique perspective or a new approach to thinking about ballet as an art form.
Ballet is an art form that traditionally values youth. With the Ballet Salon, we hope to challenge the belief that a dancer’s lifespan must end when her true adult life perhaps is only just beginning. We are interested in dancers with rich life experiences, and even dancers who have overcome obstacles in order to return to ballet. We believe that physical abilities are only part of what makes an interesting ballet dancer– we are interested in creating a space for dancers to exist as full and layered artists.
Pulling from our visual art backgrounds, we will be seeking to work with an inspiring group of professional choreographers who share our vision and understand our artists’ paths. Our program will run for 9 months (from March 2026- November 2026) and will culminate in a live performance and published zine in November of 2026. Our performance will also feature collaborations with other New York-based artists working in mediums such as painting, costume, installation, film and music.
A Little About Us
From Ballet,
to Visual Arts,
and back to Ballet
Adriana and Meiying quite literally met at the barre in an open Mark Morris ballet class where they first connected over their shared love of dance, visual art and their similar backgrounds coming from art schools (RISD and MICA). They later became colleagues at Drawing Room, where they now are staff instructors who teach drawing, painting, printmaking and textiles. They also have codeveloped Drawing Room’s figure drawing programming, which notably collaborates with art models who are professional dancers and choreographers.
Adriana Gramly
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
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 suffering hip injuries, she pivoted to the visual arts, earning a BFA in Fine Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art and later returning to dance through her passion project, Cafe Telephone. Cafe Telephone was active from 2015-2021 and brought global dancers and visual artists together to create collaborative multimedia art salons that ranged from pop-up happenings to public film screenings. Her current work as both a multidisciplinary visual artist and teacher examines how artistic collaboration can cultivate human connection and inspire community building.
