Ava Holloway started dancing when she was 3 years old. As she got older, she wondered why more dancers didn’t look like her. “The only Brown dancer most people can name is Misty Copeland,” she says, referring to the first African American female principal dancer for the American Ballet Theatre.
Over the past several years, protests by the racial justice organization Black Lives Matter sparked national conversations about racial inequality and
For example, she thought about how it was often hard for her to find pointe shoes (shoes ballet dancers wear) in colors other than pink. Dancers of color sometimes dyed their shoes to match their skin tones. “It was eye-opening to think about the differences in resources that we have compared to dancers with lighter skin tones,” Ava says.