Introducing: Miss Emily!

Our second installment of Meet Our Teachers introduces Miss Emily. I met Emily when Charlottesville Ballet started rehearsing here at The Dance Barn, and instantly liked her friendly manner and admired her beautiful dancing. When I took class with the company, I was always impressed with how hard Emily worked--it was truly inspiring! She is also an amazing performer onstage, and wonderful with kids.

Emily will be teaching creative dance and jazz for the studio this year. I am excited to have her creative and nurturing spirit as part of our Dance Barn family, and I know her students will love her as much as I do! Oh yeah, and her official bio is also below. It probably sounds way more professional than my totally biased gushing, but what can I say? I hired people I really, really like!

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Emily Mott fell in love with ballet at the age of five. She began dance classes at Roanoke Ballet Theatre in her hometown of Roanoke, VA and continued her training with Unurbat Gunaajav and Michele Goacher. While in the upper levels of her ballet school, Emily taught several creative movement classes and helped create an after school dance class for underprivileged children. She also performed in several collaborative shows with Opera Roanoke, the Mill Mountain Theatre, and with Radford University as the ‘Snow Queen’ in a joint production of The Nutcracker. She attended summer intensives at the Richmond Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and on scholarship with the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Emily spent her senior year of high school at the Virginia School of the Arts in Lynchburg, VA under the late Petrus Bosman. There she found diverse training and valuable performance opportunities in various dance festivals, in lecture demonstrations for children, and at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival. Upon graduation she joined the Richmond Ballet as a Trainee, performing in Don Quixote, Balanchine’s Valse Fantasie and Who Cares?, and in many new works by Richmond Ballet faculty. She also enjoyed working with Richmond Ballet’s Minds In Motion, a pilot program for Richmond-area schools to incite a love of dance among youth. In 2008, Emily relocated to Charlottesville, VA to join the Charlottesville Ballet and to attend the University of Virginia, uniting both her artistic and academic interests. Emily is thankful to all who have made this journey possible and looks forward to sharing her ardor for dance with the students of The Dance Barn.