Sally Rousse performs, teaches, choreographs, curates, writes, and advocates dance. She is a two-time recipient of the McKnight Fellowship for Dancers, a Sage Awardee for “Best Performer,” was named “Artist of the Year” (Minneapolis City Pages) and is the mother of two young adults. Rousse’s site-specific works have taken dance off the traditional stage into venues such as the Kwon Tung Pier in Hong Kong and up the tree of a vacant lot and have also been seen in both theatrical and commercial venues such as the Guthrie, Southern, and State Theaters; the Walker Art Center, MASS MoCA, the Cartoon Channel, and Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre. Born in Vermont, Rousse performed as a leading dancer with Ballet Chicago, the Royal Ballet of Flanders, and James Sewell Ballet, the company she co-founded in NYC. She has danced many roles in the classical and Balanchine repertoires, works by Maurice Béjart, Jiri Kylián, and more than 100 new works created on her by contemporary choreographers, branding her “Renegade Ballerina.” As an instructor of classical and contemporary ballet and Zena Rommet Floor-Barre®, Rousse seeks to replace exclusive physical standards with unbiased and somatically sound ones and continues to consider the values of ballet, its lexicon, and history. “Throughout my 50+ years in dance, I have come to feel the outwardly silent, inwardly buzzing life of moving in a studio or onstage as an exquisite, spiritual practice of polishing the soul, the character.”