Sandra Chinn

In the San Francisco bay area, Sandra Chinn is a company ballet teacher for Alonzo King LINES Ballet, ODC Dance Company and Smuin Contemporary Ballet. She is guest adjunct faculty at New York University Tisch Summer Dance Residency, Visiting Guest
Artist at Hollins University MFA Dance Program, and Artistic Advisor at Berkeley Ballet Theater.

 

She has been a guest teacher for Company Wayne McGregor, Jessica Lang Dance, dancers of Paul Taylor Dance Company, Abraham.In.Motion, Lucinda Childs Dance, Aszure Barton and Dancers, Amy Seiwart's Imagery, Post:Ballet, SF DanceWorks, Matthew Bourne's New Adventures, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, and BodyTraffic, and she teaches youth and adults at Berkeley Ballet Theater, Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, LINES Dance Center, and ODC.

 

Chinn has extensive Vaganova teacher’s training (Level 1–4) and her ballet class is somatically informed through studies with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Body-Mind Centering, Pilates, Feldenkrais, Franklin Method, Alexander Technique, Iyengar Yoga, Gyrotonics, and Gyrokinesis. Chinn believes in applying these embodied concepts to dance education and seeks to reveal to concert dancers additional possibilities for rich, efficient, and elegant movement.

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Prior to her teaching career, she studied with Jane Stamps in Albany, California and received full scholarships at the National Academy of Dance and Joffrey Ballet School. A New York Drama Desk Award nominee (“Best Featured Actress in a Musical”), she won praise as a “charismatic, expressive young star” for her various comedic dance portrayals in the Off Broadway production of Funny Feet (Stephen Holden, New York Times).

 

As a company member of Dennis Wayne’s Dancers, Finis Jhung's Chamber Ballet USA, and American Ballet Comedy, she has toured extensively throughout the world. She has danced a diverse repertory from works of Petipa, Balanchine, Anthony Tudor, Michael Fokine, John Taras, Brian MacDonald, Norman Walker, Samuel Weber, Norbert Vesak, Bob Bowyer, and Kathryn Posin.