Cassandra Trenary, a native of Georgia, began her dance training at Lawrenceville School of Ballet. She joined the school’s company, Southern Ballet Theatre, in 2006 before training at American Ballet Theatre’s Summer Intensive programs as a National Training Scholar. She went on to join the ABT Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School in 2009. In 2011, she was invited to join ABT II (now ABT Studio Company) on their European tour as an apprentice and then the American Ballet Theatre as a corps de ballet member later that year. She was promoted to Soloist in August 2015 and to Principal Dancer in September 2020.

 Some of Trenary’s most notable roles with ABT include Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Giselle in Giselle as well as original roles in ballets created by Alexei Ratmansky, Twyla Tharp, Wayne McGregor and Mark Morris. Most recently, she made her debut as Tita in the North American Premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s Like Water for Chocolate. In addition to the wide variety of classical and contemporary repertoire with ABT, Cassandra has had the privilege of dancing for Gemma Bond Dance, Daniil Simkin’s Intensio, Hamptons Dance Project, CoLab Dance, Cirio Collective, Guggenheim Rotunda Project Falls to Shadow and was a guest artist with the Royal Ballet for the JOYCE Theater’s Ballet Festival in 2019. Cassandra has had the privilege of performing independent projects such as the JOYCE produced dance play, The Tenant, by Arthur Pita, Sonya Tayeh’s Unveiling, Molissa Fenley’s State of Darkness (Bessie for Best Revival 2021), Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room & Nine Sinatra Songs (Bessie Award for Best Revival 2023) and Roland Petite’s Le Jeune Homme Et La Mort.

Cassandra extended her creative repertoire to choreographer and producer in recent years through the creation of independent short films. In 2018, she created At the Time, a short film directed by Nathan Johnson and co-produced by Drift Studios and CoLab Dance. Her second short was created in collaboration with visual tech artist Kat Sullivan, titled Tapis Roulant supported by CHANEL and ABT, 2020. Her latest work, SHED was directed by Simon Benjamin and produced by CoLab Dance and supported by Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in 2020. 

    Cassandra’s accolades include being named a 2011 National YoungArts Foundation Winner, a 2011 U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts nominee. She is also the recipient of a 2015 Princess Grace Dance Honorarium. In 2017, Trenary was honored to receive the final Annenberg Fellowship for Dance.