Janet Collins

Janet Faye Collins was born on the second of March 1917 in New Orleans, Louisiana, one of six children of a tailor and a seamstress within the Black, Catholic, Creole community of the city — a heritage that wove together African and French lineage. When she was four, in 1921, the family migrated to Los Angeles, where she spent her formative years and first studied dance at a Catholic community center.

She trained under Carmelita Maracci, Lester Horton, and Adolph Bolm, among the few teachers who then accepted Black students. At fifteen she was offered a place with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo but declined when told she would have to disguise that she was Black. She built her early career in concert and theatrical dance, giving a acclaimed solo recital in New York in 1949 and winning the Donaldson Award for her work in the Cole Porter musical Out of This World.

In 1951 Janet Collins broke the color line at the Metropolitan Opera, dancing the lead in a new production of Aida choreographed for her by ballet master Zachary Solov — becoming the first African American prima ballerina of the Met. She performed there in Aida, Carmen, La Gioconda, and Samson et Dalila before departing in the mid-1950s, and later taught modern dance, including at Marymount Manhattan College.

In her later years she withdrew from the stage, devoting herself to painting and to her Catholic faith as a Benedictine oblate. She died on the twenty-eighth of May 2003 in Fort Worth, Texas. She opened a door that had been sealed shut, and every dancer who followed passes through the light she let in. May her grace be honored forever.