EveryBody Dances with Lisa Kim Sanborn

EveryBody Dances @ Yale Schwarzman Center brings local and visiting dance artists to our Dance Studio to teach masterclasses in jazz, hip hop, salsa, modern, contemporary, precision dance and more! All community members are welcome. This week's class is led by New Haven Ballet Artistic Director Lisa Kim Sanborn. 

Ms. Sanborn presents an intermediate-advanced ballet class with a 40-minute barre followed by center work. Center work includes a tendu, adagio, and pirouette combination, followed by small and large jumps. Her class emphasizes musicality, clean lines, and strong technique and builds on technical elements. Ballet Slippers are required. She will provide a complete NYC-style classical ballet class based on 5th position.


Lisa Kim Sanborn
New Haven Ballet, Artistic Director

Lisa Kim Sanborn trained with Larry Long, Dolores Lipinski, and Warren Conover at the Ruth Page Foundation in Chicago. Ms. Sanborn joined the faculty of New Haven Ballet in 2001 and was appointed Artistic Director in 2014, the same year she instituted DanceAIR. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from Skidmore College and earned a Juris Doctorate from Albany Law School of Union University. She is a classically trained Pilates Instructor and certified in all equipment. In 2015, Yale University appointed Ms. Sanborn as an Associate Fellow of Pierson College. Ms. Sanborn has served as a member of the Arts Industry Coalition and on the Board of Directors of the Connecticut Dance Alliance.

With nearly twenty-five years of teaching experience, Ms. Sanborn’s students have been accepted to prestigious summer intensive programs, including the School of American Ballet, Boston Ballet, Chautauqua Institute, The Rock School, Pennsylvania Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Houston Ballet,  and Miami City Ballet. Her students have been offered professional trainee positions and enjoyed professional careers in dance. In addition to initiating a pre-professional sleep away summer intensive and implementing a highly regarded and effective conditioning and stretching program for pre-professional and developing dancers, Ms. Sanborn has staged and choreogrphed many works, including excerpts from Sleeping Beauty, La Sylphide, Raymonda, La Bayadére, Giselle, Le Corsaire, Swan Lake, and Paquita.

In 2013, Ms. Sanborn premiered an all-new Nutcracker. She partnered with area musicians, including Yale's Graduate School of Music, Neighborhood Music School, and Music Haven. She initiated a partnership with the Dixwell Community House (“Q House”) in 2022. Ms. Sanborn chorerographed the full-length children’s ballets Beauty and the Beast which premiered at the historic Shubert Theatre in 2018, Peter Rabbit in 2019, and children’s versions of Don Quixote in 2022 and Coppélia in 2023.

In 2021 she premiered video performances of new works, including Vivaldi Concerto for Two Violins and Caprice Nos. 4 and 5 composed by Polina Nazaykinskaya. New Haven Ballet presented free community performances and regularly performs at festivals including the Q House, Branford Festival, and the International Festival of Arts and Ideas.

Read "Why Don't We Dance More," in The New York Times.

Read "'You Think, So You Can Dance?' Science Is on It.," in The New York Times.