Born: 1960, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Jennifer Homans was 50 when she published Apollo’s Angels in 2010, a history of classical ballet that she had been working on for ten years. It is an epic work, tracing four centuries and spanning different countries, setting the evolution of the form in the many political, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts that shaped it. “The steps were never just the steps,” she writes. “They were a set of beliefs.”
Homans had already been a dance critic for The New Republic since 2001, as well as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University. Homans began studying ballet as a dancer at age eight, pursuing it as a career in her early 20s and dancing with San Francisco Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet before giving it up at age 26. “I was bored,” she later said. “It’s strange to say, because I still loved to dance. But you’re in a studio many hours a day, and often you’re waiting for someone else to come up with ideas. At a certain point I wanted to be the one with the ideas.” So she went to study at Columbia, then earned her doctorate at NYU. “I think I was always stranded between two worlds,” she said. “When I was dancing, I always had a book in my hand, and when I was in the world of my childhood and later the academic world I always had a foot in the dance studio.”
She would go on to found the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, a think tank and place for artistic experimentation bringing together writers, dancers, set designers, choreographers, and academics from different fields to think, talk, and create. Her 2022 biography, Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century, was a finalist for a Pulitzer.