Michaela Deprince

At 29 years old, Michaela Deprince physical status not available right now. We will update Michaela Deprince's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Michaela Mabinty DePrince (born Mabinty Bangura, 6 January 1995) is a Sierra Leonean-American ballet dancer.

Michaela wrote the book Taking Flight: From War Orphanage to Star Ballerina, with her adoptive mother, Elaine Deprince.

Following her and other young ballet dancers as they prepare to compete at the Youth America Grand Prix, she came to fame after appearing in the documentary First Position in 2011.

She performed with the Dance Theatre of Harlem as the youngest dancer in the company's history, and now performs as a soloist for the Dutch National Ballet.

Michaela has been a goodwill ambassador for the Dutch organisation War Child, based in Amsterdam, since 2016.

Early life

She grew up in Sierra Leone as an orphanage during the civil war, and her uncle brought her to an orphanage. Her adoptive parents were told that her father was shot and killed by the Revolutionary United Front when she was three years old, and that her mother died soon after. She was frequently malnourished, mistreated, and desgined as a "devil's child" because of vitiligo, a skin condition that causes depigmentation, she fled to a refugee camp after her orphanage was bombed.

Elaine and Charles Deprince, a couple from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and another child, also named Mabinty, were adopted by her in 1999 and taken to the United States. Michaela is the DePrince family's youngest child, nine of whom were adopted.

Personal life

Deprince, a dancer with Dance Theatre of Harlem, went on tour to Israel, where she prayed at the Wailing Wall. When heading to the Dome of the Rock and the Dead Sea, she carried a hamsa for security, a symbol that is both Jews and Muslims.

She is currently in a friendship with ballet dancer Skyler Maxey-Wert as of 2015.

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Career

Inspired by a magazine cover of a ballerina she found and kept while in Sierra Leone, DePrince trained as a ballet dancer in the U.S, performing at the Youth America Grand Prix among other competitions. She trained in classical ballet at The Rock School for Dance Education in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Concurrent with intense ballet training, DePrince took online classes through Keystone National High School, where she earned her high school diploma.

DePrince was awarded a scholarship to study at the American Ballet Theatre's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School of Ballet for her performance at the Youth America Grand Prix. She pursued a professional career despite encountering instances of racial discrimination: aged eight, she was told that she couldn't perform as Marie in The Nutcracker sadly because "America's not ready for a black girl ballerina", and a year later, a teacher told her mother that black dancers weren't worth investing money in.

DePrince was one of the stars of the 2011 documentary film First Position, which follows six young dancers vying for a place in an elite ballet company or school, and performed on the TV show Dancing with the Stars. In 2011 she made her European debut in Abdallah and the Gazelle of Basra with De Dutch Don't Dance Division (Dance Company The Hague, NL), The Hague, Netherlands. She came back there a year later to dance The Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker at the Lucent Dance Theatre.

In 2012, she graduated from the American Ballet Theatre's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School in New York, and joined the Dance Theatre of Harlem, where she was the youngest member of the company. Her professional debut performance was in the role of Gulnare in Mzansi Productions and the South African Ballet Theatre's premiere of Le Corsaire on 19 July 2012.

In July 2013, she joined the junior company of the Dutch National Ballet, based in Amsterdam. In August 2014 she joined the Dutch National Ballet as an éleve (student). In 2015 she was promoted to the rank of Coryphée. In 2016 she was promoted to the rank of grand sujet, and then to soloist at the end of the same year. When she first joined the Dutch National Ballet she was the only dancer of African origin. In 2016, she performed in the "Hope" sequence of Beyoncé's Lemonade.

DePrince has cited Lauren Anderson, one of the first black American principal ballerinas, as her role model. In 2015 MGM acquired the film rights to DePrince's book Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina. In 2018 MGM announced that Madonna will direct Taking Flight, a biopic on DePrince's life and career.

In 2021, DePrince joined the Boston Ballet as second soloist.

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