Walk into a morning class at the Houston Ballet Academy, and you will find 120 students scattered across six studios in the downtown Wortham Theater Center. Some are local teenagers who commute from suburban Katy. Others flew in from Seoul, São Paulo, and Toronto for the academy's summer intensive. Since its founding in 1955, the school has placed pre-professional dancers into companies including American Ballet Theatre, San Francisco Ballet, and, increasingly, Houston Ballet itself. In 2023 alone, five graduates joined HB II, the company's second troupe.
That pipeline—from studio to stage—is one reason Texas is no longer viewed solely as a touring stop for coastal dance companies. Anchored by long-established programs and a growing network of pre-professional training centers, the state is producing homegrown performers and choreographers in greater numbers than at any point in the last two decades.
Three Programs Shaping the Next Generation
The landscape of serious dance training in Texas has expanded well beyond the major ballet academies. Here is a closer look at three institutions whose alumni, programming, and community partnerships are reshaping what dance education looks like in the state.
Houston Ballet Academy
The academy's pre-professional division, the Ben Stevenson Academy, accepts roughly 100 students annually. Admission is competitive: in 2024, the school received over 800 audition submissions for its summer and year-round programs combined.
Stanton Welch, who has led Houston Ballet since 2003, keeps the academy's curriculum tightly integrated with the professional company. Academy students regularly rehearse in the same facility as company dancers, and the junior company, HB II, performs in the same repertoire as the main troupe. "Our students are not training in isolation," says Julie Kent, the academy's director since 2019 and former principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre. "They are learning what a professional schedule actually feels like—eight hours a day, six days a week, with performance pressure all year."
Recent alumni successes include放眼 dancer Chun Wai Chan, who joined New York City Ballet as a principal in 2022 after training at the academy, and Yuriko Kajiya, a former Houston Ballet principal who now coaches inside the same studios where she trained.
Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (Dallas)
Located in the Dallas Arts District, Booker T. Washington HSPVA is a public magnet school with a dance department that has operated since the school's founding in 1976. The program is tuition-free and admits students through a competitive audition process. Each graduating class numbers 60 to 70 dancers.
The school's alumni roster reads like a cross-section of American dance: Laurieann Gibson (choreographer for Madonna and Lady Gaga), dancer and actress Liz Imperio, and multiple current members of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. What distinguishes the program is its insistence on both technical breadth and artistic risk. Students study ballet, modern, jazz, and West African forms, and seniors are required to choreograph an original work for public performance.
Dance department chair Lily Cabatu Weiss, who has led the program since 2014, emphasizes the school's public mission. "Not every student here is aiming for a company contract," she says. "Some will teach, some will choreograph for film, some will go into arts administration. Our job is to give them a vocabulary that lets them move between disciplines."
Dance Repertory Theatre at the University of Texas at Austin
While university dance programs are common, the University of Texas at Austin's Dance Repertory Theatre operates more like a repertory company than a student showcase. Housed within the Department of Theatre and Dance, the program mounts two full productions each academic year, bringing in guest choreographers from New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico City to set work on undergraduate and graduate dancers.
Enrollment in the B.F.A. dance program is capped at roughly 35 students per class, and graduate students in the M.F.A. program often perform alongside undergraduates. In spring 2024, the company premiered a new work by choreographer Rosie Herrera, whose company is based in Miami, and restaged a 2015 piece by Austin native Andy Noble, now co-director of Houston's NobleMotion Dance.
"Students here are treated as emerging professionals, not as students filling a requirement," says Charles O. Anderson, the department's head of dance and a Bessie Award-winning choreographer. "By the time they graduate, they have résumés that include commissions, touring, and video work."
From Training Grounds to the Wider Field
The reach of these programs extends beyond their individual alumni lists. Houston Ballet Academy's annual "Nutcracker" production draws over 35,000 attendees and provides performance experience to more than 200 student dancers each year. Booker T. Washington graduates who do not pursue performance careers often return to Texas as educators, feeding the pipeline
