About

Stefanie Leigh is a dancer, coach, educator, and published poet whose work explores the intersection of technical mastery, authentic expression, and artistic voice.

She trained under Ben Stevenson at Houston Ballet Academy before dancing with Houston Ballet and later joining American Ballet Theatre under the direction of Kevin McKenzie in 1994.

After stepping away from dance for sixteen years, Stefanie returned to professional performance in her late forties. Now performing in her fifties with choreographers in Toronto and New York, her uncommon artistic journey has shaped a coaching philosophy rooted not only in technical excellence but in resilience, presence, and creative freedom.

Stefanie teaches Advanced/Professional ballet classes in Toronto, working with dancers from Canada's National Ballet School, the National Ballet of Canada, San Francisco Ballet, Milwaukee Ballet, New Jersey Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, and other companies across North America and Europe. As a ballet examination adjudicator and coach, she is sought out by dancers looking to deepen both their technique and their artistry.

Her coaching recognizes that at the highest levels of dance, technical ability alone is rarely the greatest obstacle. Instead, she helps artists cultivate presence, trust, musicality, and authentic expression so that the technique they have spent years developing can be fully realized in performance.

Stefanie is also a widely published poet whose work has appeared in journals including Rust & Moth, SWWIM, ONE ART, and The Dance Current. She leads generative writing workshops and gives lectures and master classes for dancers, writers, and other creative communities on artistic voice, creativity, and the relationship between inner life and artistic expression.

She earned a B.A., cum laude, from Columbia University with a minor in Psychology. Her honors thesis, Identities of American Dancers, was an ethnographic study of dancers at American Ballet Theatre.