Photo by Jack Mitchell

Maria Calegari is an international and US ballet instructor and former acclaimed principal dancer with the New York City Ballet (NYCB). A native New Yorker, Calegari was chosen personally at the age of 17 by choreographer and founder of the NYCB, George Balanchine, to join his world-renowned company. She worked extensively with both Balanchine and Jerome Robbins from 1974 to 1994, performing and creating over 40 soloist roles in their extensive repertory. Her principal roles covered a wide range of styles including ballets like Agon, Apollo, Swan Lake, Serenade, Dances at a Gathering, Afternoon of a Faun, Glass Pieces, Jewels, Chaconne, and Mozartiana. She has appeared numerous times on public television including Live from Lincoln Center as Titania in Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Great Performances, and, in 2010, PBS’s American Masters “Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About.”

Since 1998, she has staged ballets for both the George Balanchine Trust and the Robbins Rights Trust worldwide, often with her husband Bart Cook, at such companies as Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Ballet West, Boston Ballet, Tbilisi State Opera and Ballet, and Miami City Ballet, among others. Her staging of Diamonds/Jewels at Royal Ballet in 2007 won the Lawrence Olivier Award. 

In 2011, she became president and co-founder of the Apollo Arts Initiative Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to fostering cultural awareness and wellness in its deepest holistic sense within the community and the individual. 

She received the prestigious Jerome Robbins Award in 2011 at Lincoln Center for her contributions in dance and she is listed in the biographical dictionary Who’s Who of American Women. In 2013, Calegari received the Isadora Duncan Award (the Izzie) for outstanding achievement in her re-staging of George Balanchine’s Scotch Symphony for San Francisco Ballet in 2012.

Calegari is also an exhibited watercolorist, and she has written several published essays on the significance of the arts and culture in our world today from an esoteric perspective.