Director of Opendance
Michèle Ceballos Michot, Founding Director of Opendance, is an accomplished dancer, choreographer, artistic director, educator, visual and performance artist. Her dance performance history includes numerous international ballet companies and dance productions. Ceballos danced professionally in Colombia, England, Germany, Russia, and throughout South America and the United States.
Born in New York, Ceballos began studying ballet at the age of six in Bogotá, Colombia under the exiled dancer Vladimir Volski of the Bolshoi Ballet. A recipient of several scholarships, Ceballos continued her studies in New York City at Thalia Mara's National Academy of Ballet and Theatre Arts, the School of American Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre School the Joffrey Ballet School, and with Gabriella Taub Darvash, David Howard, Finis Jung, Yurgen Snieder and Alexander Mintz.
Ceballos joined the Royal Ballet School in London at sixteen, where she spent two years studying under the sponsorship of Margot Fonteyn and toured with the Saddlers Wells Royal Ballet. At eighteen she went on to dance with the Deutsch Oper Am Rhine in Dusseldorf, Germany, Ruth Page's Chicago Ballet and as a principal dancer with El Ballet Nacional de Colombia. At twenty-seven, Ceballos was the first Colombian Ballerina to represent Colombia at the International Ballet competition in Varna, Bulgaria, and to be invited to dance with Alicia Alonso, Director of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. In 1983, Ceballos was a founding member of the Bogotá based Kameliz Danza Contemporanea and in 1990, Ceballos founded Opendance, a non-profit, multi-cultural, intergenerational, dance arts and educational outreach company, based in Phoenix, Arizona.
Opendance is listed on the Artist Roster of the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Opendance and Ceballos were nominated in 2006 and 2007 for the Governors Arts Awards and for the Arts and Business Council award, and received the Creighton School District Partner Award in 2006. Ceballos is also a collaborating artist with Guillermo Gomez Pena', La Pocha Nostra Company out of San Francisco. La Pocha's performance and installation work, which explores cross-cultural issues and North/South relations, has been presented at over 300 venues and festivals around the world. Identity whether cultural or personal has always been of interest to Ceballos, who is also known professionally as Michelle Ceballos and Michel Cote.