BIO •

Alexandra Light (née Farber) is a choreographer working at the intersection of ballet, contemporary dance, visual art, and embodied research. Born and raised in Washington, DC, she trained at Maryland Youth Ballet, with additional study at the School of American Ballet, San Francisco Ballet School, and Houston Ballet Academy. She began her professional career with Houston Ballet II before joining Texas Ballet Theater.

As a performer, Alexandra danced principal roles for over a decade, performing works by Ohad Naharin, Martha Graham, Christopher Wheeldon, William Forsythe, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Glen Tetley, Carlos Acosta, Natalie Weir, and others, as well as leading roles in Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Don Quixote, and Romeo and Juliet. She also originated roles by Ma Cong, Ben Stevenson O.B.E., Kitty McNamee, Garrett Smith, and Val Caniparoli. In 2025, after thirteen seasons with Texas Ballet Theater, she retired from performance to focus fully on choreography.

Her choreographic work has been commissioned by Texas Ballet Theater, Steps on Broadway Conservatory, Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre, and, through a Texas Ballet Theater mainstage commission, the Martha Graham Dance Company’s ongoing Lamentation Variations project. Her work has been presented at Battery Dance Festival, Ailey Citigroup Theater, and other stage, film, and site-responsive contexts.

From 2021 to 2025, Alexandra created and led Dance at the Modern, a free public program at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth that brought contemporary dance into direct conversation with visual art, architecture, ecology, gender, and community. Across six original commissions, the program reached more than 3,600 audience members, introduced many first-time viewers to contemporary dance, and helped establish the museum as an active site for choreographic experimentation.

Alexandra’s practice has been supported by residencies and fellowships including Moulin/Belle in France, Jacob’s Pillow’s inaugural ChoreoTech Lab, the Frank Lloyd Wright Darwin D. Martin House Creative Residency, Centre Pompadour in France, ORTO in Portugal, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, The Volland Foundation, the Sue-Je Lee Gage Sunlit Residency for Human Rights and Social Justice, and BONFIRE. Her work has received attention from Pointe Magazine, NPR, ArtsATL, and other publications.

She holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, magna cum laude, from the University of Maryland Global Campus, completed while dancing full time. Her choreography draws on diasporic history, environmental memory, layered identity, and the body’s capacity to hold inheritance, transformation, and contradiction. Alongside dance, she maintains a visual art practice in mixed media, assemblage, photography, painting, and fabric work.

As a teacher, Alexandra has taught ballet, contemporary movement, choreography, somatic movement, and meditation, including through Jacob’s Pillow 360 at Southern Methodist University. She prioritizes musicality, anatomical care, clarity of form, and expressive depth, encouraging dancers to remain connected to both technical precision and felt experience. Across stage, film, and site-responsive projects, she uses her intimate knowledge of ballet not to preserve the form unchanged, but to press it toward a more expansive future.