is currently celebrating her twentieth year as a principal ballerina with American Ballet Theatre (ABT), and her repertoire includes leading roles in all of ABT’s current full-length classics and in shorter works by luminary choreographers of the past and present. As a teenager, Murphy was awarded the Prix de Lausanne Espoir, and she joined American Ballet Theatre in 1996. After being honored with a Princess Grace Foundation Award, Gillian was promoted to Soloist in 1999 and to Principal Dancer in 2002. She starred as Odette/Odile in ABT’s PBS television production of Swan Lake and as Giselle in the New Zealand Film Commission’s movie of Stiefel and Johan Kobborg’s production of Giselle at the Royal New Zealand Ballet, where she was a Principal Guest Artist for three years. Murphy has danced as a guest artist throughout the world, performing with the Mariinsky Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet, the Staatsballett Berlin, the Kiev Ballet, the Australian Ballet, as a ballerina with the Metropolitan Opera, and in numerous other international engagements and galas. In recent years, she has received a Princess Grace Statue Award and an honorary doctorate from her high school alma mater, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. In 2018, Murphy graduated summa cum laude from St. Mary’s College of California with a Bachelor of Arts, and she completed the Harvard Business School’s “Crossover into Business” program.