​Woodbury Ballet Announces New Faculty Member

Woodbury Ballet is thrilled to announce the addition of Claire Kretzschmar to our Faculty for the Spring term.

Claire Kretzschmar is a dancer, teacher, choreographer, podcast host and former soloist with New York City Ballet (NYCB). She grew up in Winston-Salem, NC where she began her dance training at the Academy of Dance Arts and Wake Forest Community Ballet. As a teenager, she continued her training at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and the School of American Ballet in NYC.

In 2010, she joined NYCB as an apprentice and progressed through the ranks to become a soloist dancer in 2018. With NYCB, Claire performed featured roles in works by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Alexei Ratmansky, Justin Peck, and Kyle Abraham. She has a bachelor’s degree in communications from Fordham University and currently co-hosts the “The Rosin Box” segment of NYCB’s podcast.

She has choreographed on multiple occasions for the New York Choreographic Institute and for “The Tiny Garage Show” – a performance series born out of the pandemic and set from inside her family’s garage. Claire recently staged and adapted Duncan Noble’s “Peter and the Wolf” for Ballet Hartford - a ballet that Claire performed in high school for the elementary schools in North Carolina.

Claire also teaches dance classes regularly and helps organize and curate programming for an arts collective in NYC called Arthouse2B.

As a dancer with NYCB, she was the recipient of the 2017 Janice Levin Award and the 2015 Martin E. Segal Awards for rising artists. She is the resident Choreographer for Ballet Hartford. Photography by Marilyn Lamanna, Pari Dukovic, Paul Kolnik.