Janet Collins

Janet Faye Collins was born on the second of March 1917 at New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of a tailor of the Black New Orleans Catholic Creole community and a homemaker. The family migrated to Los Angeles in 1921 and Collins was raised in the small Black Catholic Los Angeles community of the inter-war period.

She was placed at six at the local Catholic mission school and was given her first formal ballet instruction at ten — initially at the Lester Horton modern-dance studio at Los Angeles and from 1932 at the Adolph Bolm Ballet Russe touring school at Los Angeles.

She auditioned at fifteen in 1932 for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo on the touring company’s Los Angeles 1932 audition — and was accepted for the corps on the condition that she perform in whiteface make-up across the corps performances. Collins refused the whiteface condition; the Ballet Russe withdrew the offer.

She took private ballet training across the closing years of the 1930s at the Mia Slavenska and the Mikhail Mordkin Los Angeles studios.

She enrolled in 1939 at the Los Angeles City College for the bachelor’s in fine arts and completed the bachelor’s in 1942.

She undertook the principal solo concert-dance programme of her early career at the principal Manhattan modernist-and-classical-dance venues of the immediate post-war period — at the Hunter College Theatre concert on the seventh of November 1949 and at the New York YMHA Ninety-Second Street Y concert on the twentieth of February 1950.

She was awarded the 1949 Donaldson Award — the principal American modernist-dance award of the period — for the title role in the off-Broadway production Out of This World on the twenty-first of December 1949 at the New Century Theatre, Broadway and Forty-Ninth Street.

She was hired in February 1951 by Rudolf Bing — the new general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Association — for the principal ballerina position of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut on the twenty-second of November 1951 in the role of Ulrica’s attendant in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera under the direction of the Italian choreographer Zachary Solov — the first African American prima ballerina to perform at the Metropolitan Opera.

She danced at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet across four seasons from 1951 to 1954 in the principal ballet roles of the Metropolitan repertoire: Carmen, La Gioconda, Faust, Aida, and Samson et Dalila.

She retired from the active concert career in 1959 — at forty-two — at the request of her contemplative-monastic-religious calling. She lived from 1959 onward as a religious sister of the Roman Catholic Church and as a teacher of dance at the Catholic religious schools at New York and the Saint Cecilia Convent at Fort Worth, Texas.

She died at Fort Worth, Texas on the twenty-eighth of May 2003 of natural causes, at eighty-six.

She is honored here as the first Black prima ballerina at the Met.