She started at 13. In ballet, that is supposed to be too late — professionals usually begin as small children. Misty Copeland started anyway, was dancing en pointe within three months of her first class, and on June 30, 2015, became the first Black principal dancer in American Ballet Theatre’s 75-year history.
Principal dancer is the top rank — the highest a dancer can rise in the company. On June 30, 2015, American Ballet Theatre, known as ABT, promoted Misty Copeland to that rank. In the company’s 75-year history, no African American woman had ever held it. She was the first.
And she got there on a timeline the ballet world would have called impossible. Most professionals start training years before their teens. Copeland took her first class at 13 — and within three months she was dancing en pointe, work that normally takes far longer to be ready for. The late start that should have disqualified her became part of the proof of just how extraordinary the talent was.
The first, stated exactly — because she deserves the true one
This page checks before it posts, so here is the precision this story needs: Copeland was ABT’s first Black principal dancer. She was not the first Black principal ballerina at any major company, and calling her that would erase two women who came before her.
Debra Austin became a principal at Pennsylvania Ballet in 1982. Lauren Anderson became a principal at Houston Ballet in 1990. Both were firsts at their companies, decades before 2015, and their names belong in any honest telling of this history.
Does the accurate version make Copeland’s achievement smaller? Not at all — it makes it real. ABT is one of the most prominent ballet companies in the country, and its top rank stayed closed to Black women for 75 years, long after other major companies had opened theirs. That a dancer who started at 13 was the one who finally opened it is a story that needs no exaggeration. Inflating it to “first ever” would actually take credit away from Austin and Anderson — and a page that celebrates Black women’s firsts does not build one woman’s headline by deleting two others.
What a late start really means
Every field has its version of “too late” — an age by which you were supposed to have begun, a door that quietly closes while you are still deciding. Ballet’s version is unusually strict, because the training shapes the body from childhood.
Copeland’s story answers that rule with evidence. Thirteen years old at her first class. En pointe in three months. Principal dancer at ABT — the first Black woman to hold the rank there — as an adult. The starting age everyone would have used to count her out became the detail everyone now quotes to show what she overcame.
There is a version of this story for every late bloomer reading: the craft you picked up “too late,” the career you started after the supposed window closed. The window is real in ballet — and she went through it anyway.
Join the conversation
What did YOU start “too late” — and did you do it anyway? And do Debra Austin and Lauren Anderson get the credit they deserve in ballet history, or is this the first time you’ve seen their names? Tell us below.
Source note: Misty Copeland’s promotion to principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre on June 30, 2015 — the first African American woman to hold the rank in the company’s 75-year history — along with her start in ballet at age 13 and dancing en pointe within three months of her first class, is reported by the New York Times (June 30, 2015), AP, and HISTORY. The correction built into this article — that she was ABT’s first, not the first Black principal ballerina ever — reflects the earlier principal appointments of Debra Austin (Pennsylvania Ballet, 1982) and Lauren Anderson (Houston Ballet, 1990).
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