World famous ballerina Keenan Kampa began her dancing career at an early age in the Washington D.C. region. She began her ballet training under director Julia Cziller Redick at the Reston Conservatory Ballet which was founded in 1972 and is considered to be a premiere dance school in the D.C. area, located in Reston, Virginia.
Already by the age of 14, Kampa was attending ballet training programs in the summer. Also during her youth, she was offered the opportunity to study ballet full time at other prestigious dance academies such as Boston Ballet and American Ballet Theatre Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis school for the possibility of becoming a professional dancer.
Despite these offers, Kampa continued to remain closer to home and study dance at Reston Conservatory with Redick. Due to this decision, Kampa was able to have a more mainstream way of balancing education along with dance studies. She also performed in numerous musical theater productions through Gonzaga College High School.
While being devoted to both school and ballet, Kampa became an award winning ballet dancer early on. In 2006, she competed in the USA National Youth Ballet and received a gold medal. She also won the Russian Pointe Model Search award that year. In 2007, she was a semi-finalist at Switzerland’s Prix de Lausanne International ballet competition.
Kampa also participated in the Kennedy Center’s Master Class Series in 2007 under the direction of Ballet Master Gennady Selutsky who was from the then Kirov Ballet in St. Petersburg, Russia, now the Mariinsky Theatre. Much to her surprise, Selutsky pulled Kampa aside at the end of the class and approached her with the opportunity to come and study professional ballet dance at the Vaganova Academy, a world-renowned dance school in St. Petersburg Russia which was founded in 1738. Many world famous dancers who Keenan had admired in her youth had studied at Vaganova. Many of these dancers she had watched in old Kirov dance movies with Redick.
Kampa chose to take this offer to attend Vaganova and studied at the academy from 2007-2010. She was taught ballet under professor Tatiana Udalenkova and the artistic direction of Altynai Asylmuratova. While studying at the Vaganova Academy, she traveled to Italy with the academy and played Masha, the lead role in the “Nutcracker” ballet. She danced this role again as the first foreigner to ever perform this role at the Mariinsky Theatre in Russia.
When it came time for studies to end at the Vaganova Academy, Kampa danced a graduation performance of Gayanne and Le Corrsaire pas de deux. In her graduation class, she tied with two young Russian women for the prestigious “Miss Vaganova” award. She also received the extraordinary honor of a full Russian Diploma rather than other less prestigious diplomas which were typically given to students who were foreigners to the country.
After graduation from Vaganova, Kampa came back to the United States. She studied under the artistic direction of Mikko Nissinen at the Boston Ballet for two years. After the first year of performing at the Boston Ballet, Kampa also returned back to St. Petersburg, Russia to visit with her friends and to also rehearse for an upcoming gala with her former partner at Vaganova. While her and her partner were privately rehearsing, Ballet Master Gennady Selutsky and the Artistic Director of Mariinsky Theatre, Yuri Fateyev, looked on. Following the rehearsal without an actual formal audition, Kampa was invited to be the first ever American dancer to join the Mariinsky Theatre. While she was contracted to perform with the Boston Ballet for an additional year, she carried out the completion of her contract. Upon completion, she then began performing at Mariinsky in June 2012 at the rank of Coryphee, which is a leading dancer in the ballet corps. As an American, she was cast in many major roles at Mariinsky and received a lot of criticism from the company’s Russian fans. Despite criticism in Russia, she went ahead and left her highly coveted spot in the company. Kampa said that since there was no dance union in Russia and she didn’t ever say no, she often worked 11 hours a day, seven day a week. She then returned to the United States.
In the dance world, Keenan Kampa is anything but the average ballerina. She has been described as a person who is very real and candid. She had returned back to the United States again in 2014 after having stress fractures in her foot and hip surgery in January 2014. While she had planned on returning to Russia, the extensive hours put into her dance career had made her unhappy and she decided at the last minute to continue to stay in Los Angeles which led to more monumental opportunities. In 2014, she was a faculty member representing the Mariinsky and Kirov Ballet as a faculty member at the Grand Rapids Ballet for the summer intensive program.
Kampa then starred in a highly anticipated dance film called “High Strung” in 2015. To receive the lead in the movie, she did not have a formal audition. She received the role in a more interesting series of events beginning with a TV feature done on Kampa when NBC came to Russia for the Olympics. The angle was about Kampa as an American dancer. The director of “High Strung” saw it and set up a conference call. Since she had just had her hip surgery and was fresh off of crutches, she was unable to dance but she did go to Los Angeles to read for the part. She eventually sent video clips to the director of a class she was leading herself.
After life at the dance company and the extensive work it took, Kampa has enjoyed mixing ballet with acting. Since her role in “High Strung,” she worked on acting. She also organized a gala for France’s Lejeune Foundation in 2015 in order to raise money for genetic research that would help children with health conditions such as Down syndrome among others. Kampa still considers ballet, along with acting, a passion rather than just a professional career.
