ROUGH DRAFT — Atlanta. But she didn’t start out wanting to be a ballerina. “I grew up doing jazz and modern,” Bradford said. “I wasn’t focused on ballet at all. I really wanted to do musical theater.”

Even when she started out at Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre, she wasn’t all that excited at the prospect of dancing ballet. But as she continued on, she began to realize that ballet could be just as expressive as jazz, or modern dance, and started taking more of an active interest in the art form. Not only that, but she was really good at it. So, when she was around 12 years old, John Welker and Angela Harris approached her and her mother about joining the Catalyst Program.

The Catalyst Program’s mission is to support Black dance students, and members of Catalyst are instructed in the art of ballet on full scholarship. Black dancers have long been underrepresented in the world of ballet, with some sources putting the number as low as 4% of ballerinas in the United States. The program arose out of a partnership between Terminus and Dance Canvas, a nonprofit that aims to increase awareness of professional dance and help diversify the voices in the medium. Welker, who is the director of Terminus, said the idea for Catalyst started growing in 2020 just after the murder of George Floyd.

“There was an opportunity to take a step back and say, ‘Okay, this is not business as usual,’” Welker said. “What are we doing to help bring representation to our field that we love so much? Are we doing enough?’”[MORE]