Cassandra Trenary

Cassandra Trenary, a native of Georgia, began her dance training at Lawrenceville School of Ballet. She joined the school’s company, Southern Ballet Theatre, in 2006 and went on to receive additional training at American Ballet Theatre’s Summer Intensive programs. In 2009 she joined the ABT Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School. In 2011, she was invited to join ABT II (now ABT Studio Company) on their European tour as an apprentice. She then became an apprentice with the main Company and shortly afterwards joined the corps de ballet. She was promoted to Soloist in 2015 and to Principal Dancer in 2020.

Her large repertory with the ABT includes several principal roles in full length ballets such as Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet and Manon, Giselle and Don Quixote by Kevin McKenzie after Petipa, La Bayadère by Natalia Makarova after Marius Petipa, Le Corsaire by Konstantin Sergeyev after Marius Petipa, John Cranko’s Onegin, Helen Pickett’s Crime and Punishment, Christopher Wheeldon’s Like Water for Chocolate and A Winter’s Tale and Sir Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works.

Furthermore, she collaborated closely with Alexei Ratmansky, performing in numerous ballets he choreographed such as in The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, Harlequinade, Whipped Cream and The Golden Cockerel.

She also danced in works by George Balanchine, Sir Fredrick Ashton, Jiří Kylián, Michel Fokine, Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp, Kyle Abraham, Gemma Bond, Jessica Lang, Demis Volpi, Marcelo Gomez and Antony Tudor, among others.

In addition, she devoted herself to numerous projects, including with Twyla Tharp and The Royal Ballet London. She also worked as a writer and choreographer for short films.

Cassandra Trenary is a Guggenheim Works & Process LaunchPAD residency recipient, was named a 2011 National YoungArts Foundation Winner and became a 2011 U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts nominee. She also the received a 2015 Princess Grace Dance Honoraria and the Annenberg Fellowship for Dance in 2017.

From the 2025/26 season, Cassandra Trenary will be a Principal Dancer with the Vienna State Ballet.