Principal Dancer
Yuan Yuan Tan is a Chinese ballet dancer and arts educator. She won major prizes at international ballet competitions in Paris and Nagoya in the early 1990s and later became a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet. She is currently a specially appointed professor at the Shanghai Theatre Academy and director of its Dance Collaborative Innovation Center, and serves as artistic director of the Suzhou Ballet Theatre.
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Signature Roles
Yuan Yuan Tan began formal training at Shanghai Dance School at age eleven, progressing through the rigorous Vaganova curriculum before joining San Francisco Ballet as a soloist in 1995 at eighteen, invited by Helgi Tomasson. Promoted to principal dancer in 1997 at age twenty—the youngest in company history and the first Chinese principal dancer in a major Western ballet company—she spent nearly three decades building a repertoire of exceptional breadth, from the classical canon to world premieres by leading contemporary choreographers. Her retirement in February 2024, marked by a final performance in Ashton's *Marguerite and Armand* on her birthday, concluded a career that fundamentally altered the landscape of classical ballet and established her as one of the art form's most influential figures of her generation.
Promoted to Principal Dancer at San Francisco Ballet in 1997 at age twenty, becoming the youngest principal dancer in the company's history and the first Chinese principal dancer in a major Western ballet company; awarded the Benois de la Danse in 2002
Shanghai Dance School; John Cranko School, Stuttgart, Germany
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