Nora Kimball-Mentzos
Nora Kimball-Mentzos was born in Brooklyn and trained at the National Academy of Ballet under the guidance of Thalia Mara, the Harkness House for Ballet Art and the American Ballet Theater School with Zena Rommett. She was one of the first African-American dancers to join The American Ballet Theatre in the 1980s. She has performed as a soloist at the Nederlandse Dans Theater and the Frankfurt Ballet. She has worked with the Eliot Feld Ballet, the Stuttgart Ballet, Karole Armitage, and William Forsythe. She has danced in several Peter Sellars productions including Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins at the Lyon Opera and John Adams’s El Niño in Paris in 2000 and San Francisco in 2001. She also participates in media events and has modelled for Issey Miyake. Highly involved in the domain of corporal awareness and creativity, Nora Kimball-Mentzos has created workshops that enable children to explore physical expression through dance. At present, in addition to actively performing on stage, she is a teacher at the Hochschüle für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt and an accredited teacher of the Zena Rommett Floor Barre Technique.
