WELCOME

Miami City Ballet has a diverse roster of 54 dancers and a repertoire of more than 130 works. As one of the most renowned ballet companies in the country, Miami City Ballet performs for nearly 125,000 patrons annually during its South Florida home season in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and tours to major cities domestically and internationally, including recent visits to New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris.

Miami City Ballet School, the official school of Miami City Ballet, is one of the most respected ballet training academies in America. The School trains students, ages 3-18 year-round, and grants more than $650,000 in scholarships annually.

Miami City Ballet’s Community Engagement programs, serving more than 12,000 people annually in schools and communities; our free programs use the power of dance to uplift, teach and bring joy.

Miami City Ballet was founded in 1985 by Miami philanthropist Toby Lerner Ansin and Founding Artistic Director Edward Villella. It is headquartered in Miami Beach, FL, at the Ophelia & Juan Js. Roca Center, a facility designed by renowned architectural firm, Arquitectonica.

Lourdes Lopez has become one of the ballet world’s most prominent and accomplished contributors. Dance Magazine named her a 2018 recipient of its prestigious Dance Magazine Awards, choosing Lopez for her “…admirable stewardship of Miami City Ballet, building upon the company’s Balanchine legacy while also embracing the local culture and community of Miami,” and as “…an exemplary leader, someone whom dancers look up to and are inspired by.” In 2017, the magazine also named her one of “The Most Influential People in Dance Today”.

She became Artistic Director of Miami City Ballet in 2012, bringing with her a nearly 40-year career in dance, television, teaching and arts management. As a Soloist and Principal Dancer with New York City Ballet, Lopez danced for two legends of the art form, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Under Lopez’s direction, Miami City Ballet has become one of the country’s premier ballet companies. According to The New York Times, “This troupe [is] at the forefront of all those dancing choreography by George Balanchine today…. Bold, light, immediate, intensely musical, the dancing of Miami City Ballet flies straight to the heart.”

Born in Havana, Cuba in 1958 and raised in Miami, Lopez began taking ballet lessons at the age of five, on the recommendation of a doctor. At the age of 11 she received a full scholarship to the School of American Ballet (SAB), the official school of New York City Ballet, splitting the year between Miami and New York City. At fourteen, she moved to New York permanently to devote herself to full-time studies at SAB, and shortly after her sixteenth birthday, joined the corps de ballet of New York City Ballet.

Under the direction of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, her star rose quickly at New York City Ballet. In 1984, she was promoted to Soloist, performing countless featured roles including Balanchine’s Violin Concerto, Liebeslieder Walzer, Firebird, Serenade, Symphony in C, Agon, The Four Temperaments, and Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering, Glass Pieces, Fancy Free, In the Night, Four Seasons and Brandenburg.

Upon retirement, Lopez joined WNBC-TV in New York as a Cultural Arts reporter, writing, and producing feature segments on the arts, artists and arts education. She was also a full-time senior faculty member and Director of Student Placement, Student Evaluation and Curriculum Planning at New York’s Ballet Academy East. She served on the dance faculty of Barnard College and guest taught at numerous dance institutions and festivals in the United States.

In 2002, Lopez became the Executive Director of The George Balanchine Foundation, which works to educate the public about dance and to further the art of ballet, with a special emphasis on the work and achievements of George Balanchine. In this position, she oversaw the 2004 Balanchine Centennial Celebration, a worldwide festival honoring the choreographer and his legacy. Lopez co-founded The Cuban Artists Fund, which supports Cuban and Cuban-American artists in their endeavors.

In 2014, Lopez was elected to serve on the Ford Foundation’s Board of Trustees and is presently starting her second term, marking the first time an artist was elected to serve on its board. In 2011, she received the prestigious Jerome Robbins Award for her years in dance. She has served as a dance panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2017, she received an award from the American Immigration Law Foundation honoring Cuban Americans for their accomplishments and contributions to American society. She also co-founded Morphoses with Christopher Wheeldon in 2007—a New York-based dance company aiming to revitalize dance through innovative collaborations with important artists from the worlds of music, visual arts, design, film and fashion; and by inviting younger and broader audiences to engage in and actively experience dance.

In 2019 she was honored with Ballet Hispánico’s “Toda Una Vida” Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2021 she was awarded the prestigious “Una Vida para la Danza (A Life for Dance) by the International Ballet Festival of Miami.

Lopez is married and is the mother of two daughters, Adriel and Calliste.

Tania Castroverde Moskalenko joined Miami City Ballet as Executive Director in August 2018, bringing with her more than 20 years of experience leading performing arts institutions and guiding them through strategic, financial, and operational turnarounds. As MCB’s Executive Director, she oversees finance, fundraising and development, marketing and communications, community engagement, human resources, and the business side of the Miami City Ballet School. Sixty days after her arrival at MCB, she presented the Board with an ambitious plan for a $55M capital campaign to ensure MCB’s long-term financial health. To date, the 4-year Transforming Lives Campaign has raised 97% of its goal.

Prior to MCB, Castroverde Moskalenko served as the Chief Executive Officer of Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre, revitalizing the organization’s financial health through new programming, increased earned revenue, and expanded philanthropic support. In 2017, she was named 'Chicagoan of the Year for Dance' by the Chicago Tribune.

Prior, Castroverde Moskalenko spent four years as President and CEO of the Center for the Performing Arts and the Great American Songbook Foundation in Indiana where she implemented a strategic plan that increased and diversified programming, audience reach, board membership, and contributed revenue. Before that, she spent seven years as the Executive Director of the Germantown Performing Arts Centre in Tennessee, where she erased a structural deficit, created a reserve fund, and founded successful programs such as the GPAC Youth Symphony Orchestra and Jazz in the Box.

Castroverde Moskalenko holds a BFA from the University of Memphis, an MA in Philanthropic Studies from Indiana University, and a Certification in Non-Profit Financial Management from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government. She serves on the Board of Directors of Philanthropy Miami.

Castroverde Moskalenko was raised in Miami where she and her family arrived as political refugees from Cuba when she was six years old. She is the mother of five children and is married to a former Russian ballet dancer, Alexei Moskalenko, who is Assistant Artistic Director of the Youth America Grand Prix.

Isabel Toledo (1960 – 2019) was born in Cuba. She moved to New Jersey at a young age, where she attended high school and met her future husband, Ruben Toledo. Isabel attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons School of Design.

Isabel designed her eponymous fashion collection, which was handmade in her legendary atelier for 35 years and staged runway shows in both New York and Paris. From 2006-2008, she was Design Director for the Anne Klein designer collection for Jones New York. She has also collaborated with many mass-market companies such as Payless, Target and Lane Bryant.

Isabel was the recipient of the Cooper-Hewitt Design Award for her work in fashion in 2005. She was also the recipient of an Otis Critics' Award by the Otis College of Art and Design. In 2008, Isabel was presented with the third annual Couture Council Award for Artistry of Fashion from the Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology. Isabel’s costumes for After Midnight, a Broadway musical about the legendary Cotton Club, resulted in a Tony Nomination.

Ruben Toledo was born in Havana, Cuba in 1961. He designs mannequins, store windows, award statuettes, scarves, fabrics, dishes, carpets and an animated film on the history of French fashion entitled Fashionation for the Syndicate De Couture in Paris. He has also created witty and incisive illustrations for top fashion magazines and journals, among them The New Yorker, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, Paper, Visionaire, Interview and The New York Times.

He created and illustrated Nordstrom’s national designer ad campaign and his drawings of 100 cities around the world can be found in Louis Vuitton’s City Guides. Toledo’s work has been on exhibit internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Victoria and Albert Museum in the U.K. He is the author of Style Dictionary, a collection of his drawings and watercolors, as well as the ‘Fashion Almanac’.

His collaboration with Isabel was the subject of a book and museum exhibition titled Toledo/Toledo: A Marriage of Art and Fashion at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. They launched their first fragrance collection, Hot House Beauties, with the fragrances Crystal Honey and Kuba Rose, an homage to their birthplace of Cuba. They are the subject of an upcoming auto-documentary.

Photo © Randall Bachner.

James F. Ingalls designed MCB’s Firebird, The Fairy’s Kiss and George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker®. Recent designs for dance include Twyla Now! (NY City Center); Celts (Kansas City Ballet); Ibsen’s House (Charlotte Ballet).

Other dance work includes Unbound (San Francisco Ballet’s New Works Festival); Waiting at the Station, George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker® (Pacific Northwest Ballet); Onegin (National Ballet of Canada); Concertiana, Continuum, Brief Encounters (Paul Taylor Dance Company); Layla and Majnun, Mozart Dances, Dido and Aeneas, The Hard Nut, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (Mark Morris Dance Group).

His designs for opera include Orfeo et Euridice (Metropolitan Opera); several world premieres by John Adams and Kaija Saariaho, all directed by Peter Sellars. His recent work in theatre includes Once Before I Go, Pale Sister (Gate Theatre/Dublin); The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, The Beacon (Druid/Galway). He often collaborates with the Wooden Floor dancers in Santa Ana, CA.

Wendall K. Harrington’s career has embraced diverse disciplines including theatre, publishing and multi-image/video design and production. She received the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and American Theatre Wing awards for The Who’s Tommy. Her Broadway credits include: All The Way, Grey Gardens, Putting It Together, The Capeman, Ragtime, Company, Driving Miss Daisy, The Will Rogers Follies, The Heidi Chronicles, My One and Only and They’re Playing Our Song.

Work in opera includes: Werther, The Grapes of Wrath, Nixon In China, A View from the Bridge, The Photographer and The Magic Flute. Her designs for ballet include Cinderella, Pictures at an Exhibition, Firebird, Anna Karenina, Seranata Ratmansky, Ballet Mecanique as well as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Fairy’s Kiss at Miami City Ballet.

Harrington lectures widely on the art of projection design and is the head of the MFA program in Projection Design at the Yale School of Drama.