Polina Semionova

Born in Moscow, Polina Semionova received her ballet education at the Bolshoi Ballet School and was engaged as Principal Dancer at the Ballet of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden immediately after graduating at the age of 17. From September 2012 she has been Principal Dancer at the American Ballet Theatre, Principal Guest at the Mikhailovsky Theater, St Petersburg and at the Bavarian State Ballet Munich.

Polina Semionova dances almost all major parts of classical ballet: Odette/Odile (Swan Lake), Nikia (La Bayadère), Marie (The Nutcracker), Princess Aurora (Sleeping Beauty), Swanilda (Coppélia), Kitri (Don Quixote), Giselle and Myrtha (Giselle), Tatjana (John Cranko's Onegin), Sieglinde and Brünnhilde (Maurice Béjart’s Ring around the Ring), Manon (title role), Julia (in Kenneth MacMillan’s, Leonid Lavrowski’s and Nacho Duato’s versions of Romeo and Juliet), Michail Fokine’s Scheherazade and Les Sylphides, the title roles in Vladimir Malakhov’s Cinderella, Roland Petit’s Carmen or Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia. Her neoclassical repertoire includes Jerome Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun, George Balanchine’s BalletImperial, Diamonds, Apollon musagète (Terpsichore), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tchaikovsky Pas de deux, Theme and Variations and Symphony in C. She also interpreted William Forsythe’s The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude and Herman Schmerman, John Neumeier’s Nutcracker, Lady of the Camellias and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jiří Kylián’s Return to a Foreign Land, Antony Tudor’s The Leaves are Fading and Nacho Duato’s White Darkness.

Choreographers such as Mauro Bigonzetti, Nacho Duato, Patrice Bart, Renato Zanella, Uwe Scholz, Alexei Ratmansky, Giorgio Madia, Twyla Tharp and Christian Spuck worked with her and created roles for her. Invitations have led Polina Semionova to La Scala, Milan, the American Ballet Theatre, the Bavarian State Ballet, the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St Petersburg, the Dresden Semperoper Ballet, English National Ballet, Tokyo Ballet, Finnish National Ballet, Vienna State Ballet, Zurich Ballet, Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Bolshoi Ballet Moscow, Stuttgart Ballet and the Ballet of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma.

In 2001 she was awarded the Gold Medal at the International Ballet Competition in Moscow, in 2002 the First Prize of the Waganowa Ballet Competition in St Petersburg and the Junior Prize of the International Ballet Competition in Nagoya, Japan. In 2004 she was honoured with the Berlin Audience Award for Daphne, in 2005 with the Deutschen Kritikerpreis as well as the Deutschen Tanzpreis Zukunft. In 2007 she was named Dancer of the Year by the German ballet magazine Tanz and received the Heinz Spoerli Prize in 2008. In 2014 she was awarded the most important prize in the ballet world, the Benois de la Danse. In April 2017 she was finally appointed Berliner Kammertänzerin by the Berlin Senate. In 2013 Polina Semionova was appointed the youngest honorary professor at the Staatliche Ballettschule Berlin.