Barbara Milberg

Barbara Milberg Fisher (born 1931 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American academic and professional dancer. She is professor emerita of English at the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she taught for 29 years. She has published several works, including on the life of Wallace Stevens. Prior to her academic career, under her maiden name, Barbara Milberg, she danced with the short-lived Ballet Society, founded by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein; became soloist with the New York City Ballet (NYCB) in its first decade; and then joined Jerome Robbins's newly formed Ballets: USA, touring Europe and the States with that company as a principal dancer.

The daughter of immigrant Ukrainian Jews, Barbara Milberg, reared with her older brother, David, in Brooklyn, was a student of classical piano from childhood. By the age of six she had survived dysentery and pneumonia, and her parents (father, a dentist; mother, a hygienist) enrolled her in ballet lessons to build up her strength. For several years she studied at the School of American Ballet, and, in 1946, at 14 years old, was invited by Balanchine to join Ballet Society, the beginning of her career as a professional dancer, which extended to 1962.

As a child, Milberg began dancing lessons in Brooklyn with a teacher she knew only as "Selma," and subsequently enrolled as a student at the School of American Ballet (SAB) for further training. In the early 1940s, she began to study classical piano with Dorothy Taubman, who prepared her for admission to New York's High School of Music and Art. At SAB, her teachers included Pierre Vladimiroff, Muriel Stuart, Anatole Oboukhov, Felia Doubrovska, and, after joining Ballet Society, Balanchine. Her first performance in Ballet Society was in 1946, as a member of the corps de ballet in Balanchine's Mozart work Symphonie Concertante.

...
Wikipedia