Adrian Danchig-Waring

Adrian Danchig-Waring is an American ballet dancer who has been a principal dancer with New York City Ballet since 2013. He is also Artistic Director of New York Choreographic Institute.

Early life Danchig-Waring was born in northern California and first studied ballet at Dance Theatre Seven under David Roxander. He has written that "I was always dancing, so my parents enrolled me in Russian Folk Dance, because I have Russian blood on my mom’s side. I started doing gymnastics and Chinese acrobatics, and then we moved across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County and it just so happened there was a dance studio that had this pre-professional ballet program, but they also had tap and jazz and modern and Afro-Haitian and pantomime, and I did it all. The one thing I was really resistant to was ballet. It was too structured for me. Free-form hippie dance, that’s what I wanted to do when I was a kid. It took me a while to mature to appreciate the regimented nature of ballet.”

Career Danchig-Waring entered the School of American Ballet in the fall of 2001. About a year later, he became an apprentice with New York City Ballet, and in June 2003 became a member of the corps de ballet. He was promoted to soloist in 2009 and to principal in 2013.

Among the ballets in which his performances have received acclaim are George Balnchine's Apollo , Chaconne , Symphony in Three Movements , Agon , Serenade , Harlequinade , Monumentum pro Gesualdo/Movements for Piano and Orchestra , and Episodes ; Jerome Robbins's Dances at a Gathering , Afternoon of a Faun , Concertino , and Glass Pieces ; Merce Cunningham Summerspace ; Alexei Ratmansky's Odesa , Justin Peck's Rotunda , Lar Lubovich's Each in Their Own Time , and Pam Tanowitz's Gustave le Gray No. 1 A round-up review of NYCB's 2018 winter season in The New York Times commented that "Mr. Danchig-Waring has been a standout all season"; the article ended with, "But what stuck out the most [during the season] was the newfound brilliance of Adrian Danchig-Waring. There’s a patience in the way he holds his body that seems to stretch time. He’s so clear, so refined yet not quite of this world. Something has broken free in him, and it feels like a whiff of the spring to come."

Danchig-Waring was a founding member of Morphoses (originally called Morphoses/The Chirstopher Wheeldon Company), for which he danced in Wheeldon's Mesmerics ; Luca Veggetti's Bacchae ; and Pontus Lidberg's Labyrinth (Labyrinth Within) .

He is Artistic Director of the New York Choreographic Institute.