Our director and mentor here in Star City School of Ballet. He is not only wonderful and fun to be with, but knows just how to help each student improve and dance to the best of their abilities. 

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Learn more about his biography here.

Born and raised in New York City, Ms. Larsen received her professional dance training at the School of American Ballet, the Pacific Northwest Ballet School and the New York School of Ballet. She was a member of Pacific Northwest Ballet under the direcDon of Kent Stowell and Francia Russell, and subsequently joined the Alberta Ballet, directed by Mikko Nissinen. She performed with the Suzanne Farrell Ballet as a soloist at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. before joining Oregon Ballet Theatre as a principal dancer under artistic director Christopher Stowell.

Over the course of her career, Ms. Larsen danced prominent roles in ballets by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, James Kudelka, Christopher Wheeldon and Paul Taylor, among others, and originated roles in numerous ballets. She retired from performing in 2010 to focus on teaching, coaching and writting about dance. She was a founding member of Incoroporamento, a collaborative trio combining dance, poetry, and music, producing several performances to critical acclaim.

Ms. Larsen has taught and coached widely across the country and has been a guest teacher for schools in Japan and Canada.

She is a regular contributor to Dance Magazine, Pointe, Dance Teacher, and Dance Spirit magazines. Her writing has appeared in Dance/USA’s In the Green Room, Oregon ArtsWatch, the Dancing Times, as well as the Threepenny Review, Page & Spine, and The Maine Review. In 2015 she was honored with a fellowship to the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, NM, to pursue her work as a writer. Her memoir, Being a Ballerina: The Power and Perfection of a Dancing Life, was published by the University Press of Florida in 2021.
She lives in Asheville, NC.

Kathy Sawyer Holtgrave began her training with the Tidewater Ballet Association in Norfolk, VA.
She attended and graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts, and continued her
studies at the School of American Ballet and the Joffrey Ballet School.
Kathy danced with the Joffrey Concert Group, the San Antonio Ballet and the Louisville Ballet
under the direction of Alun Jones and Helen Starr. During her sixteen year career with the
Louisville Ballet, she rose to the rank of principal dancer performing title roles in works of
renowned choreographers such as Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, John Cranko, Eugene
Loring and Antony Tudor. She has danced title roles in the majority of the classical ballets,
including Coppelia, Giselle, Romeo and Juliet, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty and Swan
Lake.
Since her retirement in 2001, Kathy has focused on teaching and coaching dancers of all ages.
She has been a guest dancer and instructor for Corpus Christi Ballet, Northwest Florida Ballet,
Santa Barbara Festival Ballet, Sunking Adult Dance Camps and Virginia Ballet Theatre. Kathy has
served on the faculty of the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts and currently serves as
Ballet Mistress for Nutcracker Key West.

Isabel Meyers is a contemporary and modern dance artist and choreographer. She grew up as a student of the Academy of Dance in Warner Robins, Georgia, and went on to earn her degree in Dance from Hollins University in the spring of 2021. For three years, she served as the co-director of the Hollins Repertory Dance Company, where she organized and choreographed company performances and taught dance classes in her community. She is an alumna of American Dance Festival and Bates Dance Festival, and she is certified in the National Dance Institute Art of Teaching.