Emily's stats

Hometown: Mountain Lakes, NJ

Height: 5’7”

Age: 17

Favorite Dance Genre: Ballet

Ultimate Dance Goal: To dance professionally, hopefully abroad for awhile, in a classical or contemporary ballet company, and then to go to medical school to study orthopedics or do graduate work in international relations/law.

Emily Erickson, 17, is a high school senior at The Professional Children's School in New York City and a native New Yorker. Although she currently lives in northern New Jersey with her family, Emily commutes into New York daily to attend school and to dance as a trainee at the Joffrey Ballet School. She has studied classical ballet for more than ten years and made her stage debut as Thumbelina at the tender age of three!

After moving from upstate New York to New Jersey when she was four, Emily pursued interests in music, competitive figure skating and horseback riding as well as dance for several years, until she landed in New Jersey Ballet's intensive program for young dancers at nine and time then spent performing and traveling regionally with the company eclipsed time for most every other extracurricular activity in her life. She was hooked on ballet!

Emily began dancing in New York with the Manhattan Youth Ballet, and by thirteen added summer dance programs that served to both enhance her technique training and further illuminate the life of a professional dancer. She has danced at the Chautauqua School of Dance, Boston Ballet School, San Francisco Ballet School and Complexions Contemporary Ballet over the past four summers. She loves to travel!

Emily is also an accomplished musician, playing both the harp and the piano. She is the Principal Harpist for the New Jersey Youth Symphony, a position she has held for all four years of high school, and she is a founding member of the newly formed Carnegie Hall Youth Council in New York.

Emily is currently applying to colleges and weighing several different options for the future: Conservatory? Four year college with dance on the side? Four year college with a dance major? Defer college to dance professionally right after high school graduation? Emily aspires to a professional dance career, and later hopes to study international relations, languages, and biology, eventually leading perhaps to a medical degree and a specialization in orthopedics.

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