George Balanchine

Career Trajectory

Balanchine began as a dancer and choreographer in post-revolutionary Petrograd before joining Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris, where he created over one hundred ballets and established himself as a modernist visionary. Immigrating to America in 1933, he founded the School of American Ballet and subsequently New York City Ballet, institutions through which he transformed classical ballet into a distinctly American art form characterized by speed, musicality, and abstract formal innovation. His ballets—from the lyrical Serenade to the austere Agon—remain foundational works of the modern ballet canon, and his pedagogical legacy continues to define how classical ballet is taught and performed worldwide.