Musician, dancer, and actress Mía Maestro studied the arts in Argentina until the age of 18, when she moved to Berlin for further vocal training and was able to add the works of classical German composers to her singing repertoire along with further acting and dance experience. At 20 years old, Maestro traveled back to Buenos Aires, where she won an ACE award for her performance in a theatrical production o ...

(born May 11, 1894, Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died April 1, 1991, New York, New York) influential American dancer, teacher, and choreographer of modern dance, whose ballets and other works were intended to “reveal the inner man.” Over more than 50 years she created more than 180 works, from solos to large-scale works, in most of which she herself danced. She gave modern dance new depth as a vehic ...

Nikki Cox's show-business career started rolling when she was just four years old. It was at this young age that she began to demonstrate the coordination and creativity that made her parents enroll her in dance classes, and it was five years later that a talent scout spotted her in one of those very classes. She was soon cast as a dancer in Moonwalker, and as Ryan White's sister in The Ryan White Story. Co ...

Polish-born Edyta Sliwinska rose out of a difficult, economically trying background (and a working-class Eastern European family), with the singular goal of establishing herself as the world's preeminent Latin dancer. Sliwinska reportedly gravitated to dance as a corollary of her deep-seated love of music. Shortly after establishing herself in the professional arena, she was tapped by ABC to participate in ...

Jessica Sutta was born on May 15, 1982, in Miami, FL, and from a young age showed a passion for dancing. She attended a local performing arts high school, eventually earning a spot on the dance team for the Miami Heat. Her skills also earned her parts in music videos for singers like Will Smith, Craig David, and Beyoncé, as well as snagging minor acting roles in movies like From Justin to Kelly. Sutta moved ...

A dancer well-versed in a panorama of styles, Lacey Schwimmer (also occasionally credited as Lacey-Mae Schwimmer) attained national celebrity via her enlistment in season seven of the popular ABC competition-based reality series Dancing with the Stars. On that program, Schwimmer danced opposite musician Lance Bass of the pop group *NSYNC. ...

A budding TV star, Jennifer Esposito opted to focus more exclusively on movies after landing one of the lead roles in Spike Lee's incendiary Summer of Sam (1999). A native New Yorker, Esposito trained at the Lee Strasberg Institute and worked on TV in the early 1990s, including a recurring role on New York Undercover. Following small roles in indie films Kiss Me, Guido (1997) and A Brother's Kiss (1997), Es ...

A fixture of American musical theater during the mid- to late 2000s, Laura Bell Bundy sported a résumé that could have easily been mistaken for a laundry list of most covetable Broadway roles. Bundy gravitated to stage performance at the tender age of nine in regional and Manhattan-area theater in such productions as Ruthless! The Musical, but achieved greatest prominence on the Great White Way for originat ...

The daughter of 1970s and '80s television icon Greg Evigan (My Two Dads, B.J. and the Bear), performer Briana Evigan was born in 1986 and followed in the show-business path of her famous father. She divided her energies between singing, dancing, and acting, and signed for one of her first leads at age 21 in the dance-themed urban drama Step Up 2 the Streets (2008). In that picture, Evigan played Andie, a st ...

While she appeared in several notable features in the 1980s and 1990s, TV was the star-making venue for Jasmine Guy. A multi-talented performer, Boston-born Guy began her career as a dancer for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. She moved to acting and television, however, with a part in the TV film At Mother's Request (1987) and a starring role as snooty co-ed beauty Whitley in The Cosby Show spin-off ...