Misty Copeland: Thirteen Years Late, and Still Early
She took her first ballet class at thirteen, free, on the basketball court of a Boys & Girls Club in San Pedro, from a teacher named Cynthia Bradley. Three months later she was dancing on pointe — a timetable that ought to be physiologically impossible in an art form built on a decade of childhood conditioning. Nineteen years after that, on 30 June 2015, she became the first African American woman promoted to principal dancer in American Ballet Theatre's seventy-five-year history.
The Sunset Inn
Misty Danielle Copeland was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on 10 September 1982. Her father, Doug Copeland, is of German and African American descent; her mother, Sylvia DelaCerna, is of Italian and African American ancestry, was adopted by African American parents, had studied dance, and once cheered for the Kansas City Chiefs. Between the ages of three and seven Misty lived in Bellflower, California, then San Pedro. By 1994, after her mother's separation from her third husband, the family was homeless and living in two small rooms at the Sunset Inn in Gardena, where the children slept on couches and floors.
Three Months to Pointe
At seven, watching the television film *Nadia*, she was captivated by the gymnast Nadia Comăneci. Ballet came six years later. Her drill team coach at Dana Middle School, Elizabeth Cantine, pushed her toward Cynthia Bradley's free classes at the local Boys & Girls Club in early 1996. Bradley began collecting her from school and driving her to the San Pedro Dance Center. Three months in, she was en pointe. By fourteen she had won a national ballet contest and taken her first solo role; at fifteen she took first place in the Los Angeles Music Center Spotlight Awards, with the *Los Angeles Times* calling her the best young dancer in greater Los Angeles.
The Custody Case
The speed created its own crisis. Copeland moved in with the Bradleys, splitting weekdays with them and weekends with her mother. In 1998, after a summer workshop at the San Francisco Ballet School, the arrangement collapsed. She ran away for three days while a lawyer, Steven Bartell, filed emancipation papers; her mother, represented by Gloria Allred, sought restraining orders and claimed the Bradleys had brainwashed her daughter. It played out in public at Torrance Superior Court. The case was dropped after her mother undertook to let her keep dancing, and Copeland withdrew her petition — she said later she had not fully understood what "emancipation" meant. She returned to San Pedro High School, held a 3.8 grade point average, and trained under the former ABT dancer Diane Lauridsen.
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Every summer program she auditioned for in 1999 offered her a place. She attended ABT's Summer Intensive in 1999 and 2000 on full scholarship, was named ABT's National Coca-Cola Scholar in 2000, and was one of six dancers out of 150 chosen for the junior troupe. She joined ABT's Studio Company in September 2000 and the corps de ballet in 2001. Eight months later a lumbar stress fracture cost her nearly a year. To rebuild her bones she was put on birth control pills to induce puberty, and her body changed fast. "Leotards had to be altered for me... to cover my cleavage, for instance," she recalled. "I hated this sign that I was different from the others... I became so self-conscious that, for the first time in my life, I couldn't dance strong." Management scrutiny of her body contributed to a binge eating disorder.
She came out the other side by reversing the terms. "My curves became an integral part of who I am as a dancer, not something I needed to lose to become one," she has said. "I started dancing with confidence and joy, and soon the staff at ABT began giving me positive feedback again."
Soloist, Firebird, Six Fractures
She was promoted to soloist in August 2007, among the youngest in the company's history, and for years remained the only African American woman in it. The press began calling her the Jackie Robinson of classical ballet. Her first leading role at ABT came in 2012 with *The Firebird*, premiered at the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa and named by the *Los Angeles Times* one of the year's best dance performances. Then, after a single New York performance of it, she withdrew from the rest of the season with six stress fractures in her tibia, had surgery in October and lost seven months.
30 June 2015
Everything landed in one year. In June she became the first Black ballerina to dance Odette/Odile at the Metropolitan Opera House, and the pioneers Raven Wilkinson and Lauren Anderson came onstage to present her with bouquets. She debuted as Juliet on short notice. *Time* named her one of the hundred most influential people in the world and put her on the cover — the first dancer there since Bill T. Jones in 1994. Then, on 30 June, ABT made her a principal. Before her, only Debra Austin at Pennsylvania Ballet in 1982 and Lauren Anderson at Houston Ballet in 1990 had reached principal rank at a major American company.
The Second Job
Prince filmed a video with her in March 2009 for his cover of "Crimson and Clover," directing her with the only note she needed: "Be you, feel the music, just move." She danced on pointe to "The Beautiful Ones" on his *Welcome 2 America* tour, including at Madison Square Garden. In 2014 she became an Under Armour athlete in a campaign *Adweek* rated among the ten best ads of the year and the best of the year aimed at women — and which paid her more than her ballet career did; in 2017 she publicly criticised the company's founder over his praise of Donald Trump, insisting sponsors should champion diversity and inclusion. She wrote *Life in Motion* (2014), the children's book *Firebird* (2014), *Ballerina Body* (2017) and *Black Ballerinas* (2021), played Ivy Smith in the Broadway revival of *On the Town* in 2015, and danced the lead ballerina in *The Nutcracker and the Four Realms* (2018).
Why Misty Is Called a Genius
This is the case that most needs stating carefully, because the honest version is stronger than the inflated one. Copeland is not a prodigy of intellect and has never claimed to be. What she has is a physical anomaly and a strategic mind. The anomaly first: she started at thirteen, in a discipline where serious training normally begins closer to six, and was on pointe within three months. Ballet training exists precisely because a body must be reshaped over a decade; she compressed that, then survived a lumbar stress fracture, a chemically induced puberty, six stress fractures in a single tibia and a back injury, and still danced Odile at the Met.
The strategic mind is the less-discussed half. Copeland understood earlier than her own institution did that the barrier facing Black women in ballet was not talent but visibility, and she built an apparatus to attack it: the Under Armour campaign, the *Time* cover, four books, a Barbie doll, and eventually a foundation running after-school ballet in underserved communities. That is a considered theory of change, executed by someone simultaneously doing full-time principal work.
The counter-case is fair. Her promotion arrived amid enormous public pressure, and some purists have argued her classical technique was not the finest in the company. Nor was she quite the first at everything the press claimed — Anne Benna Sims and Nora Kimball were ABT soloists in the 1980s. The genius here is physical and tactical rather than cerebral. On both counts it is real.
Legacy
The NAACP gave her the Spingarn Medal, its highest honour, in 2021. Before that came Glamour's Woman of the Year in 2015, a seat on the President's Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition in 2014, a Dance Magazine Award, and honorary doctorates from Hartford, New York University and Wake Forest. She founded Swans for Relief in 2020, bringing together thirty-two ballerinas from fourteen countries, and the Misty Copeland Foundation in 2022. She married the attorney Olu Evans in 2016; their son was born in 2022. She retired from ABT in 2025 with a gala farewell. The truest measure of what she changed is that the next Black principal dancer will not need a magazine cover to get there.
