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Female ballerina on stage dancing

Source: Inti St. Clair / Getty

Today, The American Ballet Theater made an announcement about one of their top soloist ballerinas… Misty Copeland, 32.
Today was the day that she promoted to be the first African-American female “Principal Dancer” in their company’s 75-year history.
After 14 years with the company and almost eight years as a soloist, Misty’s promotion has spread her fame across the “traditional dance circles.”

During her time as a soloist, Misty made the cover of Time Magazine as one of the top 100 influential people, she was featured on “60 Minutes”. The “60 Minutes” interview showed her late start into being a ballerina and her backstory of her childhood life and about her natural true talent and she did a commercial for Under Armour too.
Misty wrote a memoir called “Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina” where she says, “My fears are that it could be another two decades before another black woman is in the position that I hold with an elite ballet company.”
“That if I don’t rise to principal, people will feel I have failed them.”
The former co-director of Ballet Theater, Jane Hermann, said, “I’ve never heard a public discussion of whether someone would be promoted to principal.”
It’s been half-century since that last African-American ballerina broke out the color barrier by Arthur Mitchell in 1962.