Maddie Ziegler

At 22 years old, Maddie Ziegler has this physical status:

With Abby Lee Dance Company, Ziegler won numerous titles at regional, state and national dance competitions, including the 2014 Dancers Choice Award for Favorite Dancer 17 & Under. In 2010, she performed for Paula Abdul's reality television program Live to Dance. In 2011, eight-year-old Ziegler and her mother appeared on the first season of Lifetime's Dance Moms, a reality show about the young dancers on Abby Lee Miller's Abby Lee Dance Company Elite Competition Team and their often quarrelsome mothers. Ziegler "emerged as the preternaturally polished standout on six seasons" on the show, where she continued to appear alongside her mother and younger sister, Mackenzie, until 2016, their last season on the show. In 2013, she made guest appearances on a spin-off program, Abby's Ultimate Dance Competition. Dance Moms helped to make Ziegler "one of the most famous dancers in the entertainment world currently. ... [She inspires] other dancers to pursue their dreams with originality and grace."

Ziegler has appeared in music videos for such artists as Alexx Calise, Sia and Todrick Hall. She gained wide notice, at the age of 11, by starring in the 2014 video for "Chandelier" by Sia, who discovered her on Dance Moms. The video won the ARIA Music Award for Best Video and received nominations at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards for Video of the Year and Best Choreography, winning the latter. It was also nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Music Video in 2015. It has received more than 2 billion views on YouTube, and at one point it was the 13th most viewed YouTube video of all time. Ziegler said of the choreography: "It ... was really out of the box and it expanded me a lot, because I'm used to competition dances where you're like, Point your legs! But this time it was like, you just need to let go and feel it."

In 2015, Ziegler starred with Shia LaBeouf in "Elastic Heart", another Sia video, which has accumulated more than 1 billion YouTube views. Later that year, Ziegler starred in the music video for "Big Girls Cry" to complete her trilogy of videos from Sia's album 1000 Forms of Fear. She danced to Sia's vocals on several television shows in 2014 and 2015, including The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Dancing with the Stars, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Saturday Night Live, as well as at the Hollywood Bowl. By the end of 2015, she had performed with Sia on the Ellen DeGeneres Show three times. She also performed to "Chandelier", alongside Sia and Kristen Wiig, at the 2015 Grammy Awards. The "Chandelier" and "Elastic Heart" videos were both selected as part of PopSugar's 2016 list of "25 of the Best Dance Videos of the Last Decade". In 2016, Ziegler starred in a fourth Sia video, "Cheap Thrills", from the album This Is Acting, in which she "delivers another powerful performance". This was followed by a fifth Sia video, later that year, for "The Greatest". Kathleen Hildebrand wrote in Süddeutsche Zeitung that anyone who has seen Ziegler's "iconic" movement will never again return to "boringly ordinary" MTV videos. Ziegler continued the collaboration with Sia and the group LSD in the music videos for "Thunderclouds" (2018) and "No New Friends" (2019). She also dances in the 2020 music video for Sia's single, "Together".

In 2012, Ziegler's first professional acting job was portraying the character Young Deb on an episode of the Lifetime series Drop Dead Diva. In 2014, Ziegler appeared as a guest star in Episode 34 of HitStreak Summer, a made-for-mobile series. She continued her acting career in 2015 with guest spots on the Disney Channel series Austin & Ally and ABC Family's Pretty Little Liars. In January 2016, she guest starred in the episode "Ballet and the Beasts" on Nickelodeon's Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn. She returned to Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn in January 2017 in the episode "Keeping Up with the Quadashians".

Ziegler voiced the character Camille in the animated film, Ballerina (2016), released in the US in 2017 as Leap!, and played Christina in the feature film The Book of Henry (2017). Colin Trevorrow, the director of The Book of Henry, told Entertainment Weekly that Ziegler "is extraordinarily capable. ... She finds whatever emotion she needs to dial in very quickly. No one taught her how to do that she just knows." A reviewer for Santa Monica Daily Press wrote that, in The Book of Henry, "Ziegler ... does a wonderful job with a character forced to hide her pain". In 2019, she narrated a tribute film about her friend Simone Biles for BBC Sport. Ziegler co-starred as the title character in a musical film written and directed by Sia, titled Music, released in February 2021. Chris Willman, in Variety, called Ziegler's performance as a non-verbal autistic teenager "not always credible" but commented that she had "no limitations in ... dancing up a storm". Although she received the 2021 Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actress for the role, she received several favorable reviews.

Ziegler co-stars in the high school drama film The Fallout, which premiered in March 2021 at South by Southwest, where it won the Grand Jury Prize in the Narrative Feature Film Competition. It was released on HBO Max in January 2022 and in theatres where HBO Max is not available. Ziegler's performance as the popular but lonely Mia was called "stoic yet sensitive and vulnerable", "a staggering performance" and "astounding ... fully realized and complex". She plays Velma in Steven Spielberg's 2021 version of West Side Story and has been cast in the leading role, Lindy, in the upcoming film Bloody Hell, written and directed by Molly McGlynn.

Ziegler has modeled for, or represented, such brands as Clean & Clear, Capezio, including their Betsey Johnson line, Target, Ralph Lauren, and Tiffany & Co. She has also been featured on numerous magazine covers and in fashion editorials for Schön!, Elle, Dance Spirit, Nylon, Vs., Seventeen, Harper's Bazaar, People, Dazed, Cosmopolitan, i-D, Billboard, Teen Vogue, Stella, Maniac, Vanity Fair Italia, Flaunt, Paper and Galore.

Ziegler and her sister released a fashion line, The Maddie & Mackenzie Collection in 2014. At the 2015 New York Fashion Week, Ziegler acted as a correspondent for Elle. She launched a casual fashion line, MaddieStyle, for girls and juniors, in 2016. In 2017, she appeared as a guest judge in an episode of Project Runway and appeared on the cover of Sia's 2017 album Everyday is Christmas. In 2018 Ziegler collaborated with Sia on a lipstick, VIVA GLAM Sia, to benefit the M.A.C. AIDS Fund. Ziegler has a make-up collaboration with Morphe Cosmetics and a fashion collaboration with Fabletics.

Ziegler appeared as the featured dancer in the ABC TV special The Wonderful World of Disney: Disneyland 60 in February 2016, during the song "Part of Your World", sung by Kelsea Ballerini and choreographed by Travis Wall. A Huffington Post reporter called the number "stunning and graceful". In April 2016, six of her pre-taped performances were projected onto the big screens during Sia's Coachella set, and Ziegler appeared live with Sia at YouTube's Brandcast event in New York City. In May 2016, Ziegler appeared on the season finale of The Voice with Sia, dancing to "Cheap Thrills". The following month, she starred in another Todrick Hall video, "Taylor in Wonderland", based on Alice in Wonderland, dancing to a mash-up of Taylor Swift songs. Also in June, Ziegler joined Fox's So You Think You Can Dance: The Next Generation, a television competition for dancers, ages 8 to 14, where she was one of the judges and a guest performer, and danced at Sia's concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. In September 2016, Ziegler performed with Sia at the launch of Apple's iPhone 7 and at the iHeartRadio Music Festival.

She joined Sia on the singer's "Nostalgic for the Present Tour" from September to November 2016. Ziegler and her sister conducted a dance workshop tour of Australia in January 2017. In March 2017, Ziegler performed at the Dubai World Cup with Sia. In September, Ziegler danced to Sia's song "Rainbow", from the soundtrack to My Little Pony: The Movie, dressed in a wig and outfit that simulated the look of Sia's character in the film. She again performed with Sia on a mini-tour of Australasia in November and December 2017, and later in December, she and Sia returned to the Ellen show to perform Sia's song "Snowman". Ziegler and her sister conducted another dance workshop tour of Australia and New Zealand in July 2018 and in the UK in 2019. In July 2019, Ziegler performed at the Fuji Rock Festival with Sia in Japan. She and her sister were guest judges in 2020 on the Quibi dance competition show Floored.

Ziegler wrote the foreword to Abby Lee Miller's 2014 memoir, Everything I Learned about Life, I Learned in Dance Class. Ziegler interviewed her friend Millie Bobby Brown for a cover article in the November 2016 issue of Interview magazine. In 2017, she released her own memoir, The Maddie Diaries, which became a New York Times Best Seller. Ziegler also wrote a trilogy of novels for middle-grade readers. The series centers on a 12-year-old dancer, Harper, whose family relocates to a new state, as she negotiates the pre-teen challenges of making new friends while earning her place on a competitive dance team. The first novel, The Audition, was released in 2017, The Callback was released in 2018, and The Competition followed in 2019.

Ziegler has an active social media presence, with more than 13 million Instagram followers, over 1.3 million Twitter followers and over 3 million followers on Facebook. Videos of her dancing have accumulated more than five billion total views on YouTube. Her YouTube channel has more than 3.5 million subscribers.

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