Benjamin Millepied
choreographer
About this Artist
BENJAMIN MILLEPIED is a choreographer, filmmaker, and former principal dancer with New York City Ballet (NYCB). Born in Bordeaux, France, Millepied began his ballet training at the age of eight. He attended the Conservatoire National de Lyon before travelling to New York City to attend the School of American Ballet (SAB), the official school of NYCB. In 1995, Millepied was invited to join NYCB where he performed a vast repertoire of works by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins and originated roles in ballets by Alexei Ratmansky, Christopher Wheeldon, Mauro Bigonzetti, Angelin Preljoçaj, and Peter Martins, among others.
Millepied began choreographing during his time at NYCB, founding a pick-up troupe, Danses Concertantes, in 2002, with whom he successfully toured for eight years. The Baryshnikov Arts Center invited him to serve as choreographer-in-residence from 2006 to 2007, during which time he created the much-lauded solo Years Later for Mikhail Baryshnikov. Millepied’s choreography has entered the repertories of major dance companies worldwide, including NYCB, Paris Opera Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Berlin Staatsoper, Mariinsky Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and Lyon Opera Ballet, among others. In 2010, Millepied’s choreography was featured in Darren Aronofsky’s award-winning film Black Swan, in which he also starred.
Millepied moved to Los Angeles in 2012 to found his company L.A. Dance Project (LADP) which has since given hundreds of performances at prestigious venues around the world, as well as site-specific performances in eminent non-traditional venues. To accommodate the scope of his creative projects, Millepied founded the Amoveo film production company with composer Nicholas Britell in 2013. In 2014, he also co-founded Artform with Britell: a tech start-up with the aim of promoting present-day artists and the arts at large.
In January 2013, the Paris Opera Ballet appointed Millepied as its new Director. He programmed two highly successful seasons for the company before resigning in 2016 to focus more fully on the development of LADP and to pursue his own work as a choreographer and filmmaker. Millepied has directed numerous short dance films in recent years and is currently working on two feature films, one of which will be a musical adaptation of Carmen to be released in 2019.
Millepied is a past recipient of the prestigious “Bourse Lavoisier” scholarship from the French government, a winner of the Prix de Lausanne, a recipient of SAB’s Mae. L. Wien Award for Outstanding Promise, and a United States Artists Wynn Fellow in Dance. In 2010, he was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture.