Katia Raj comes from the small town of Elmira, New York on the Pennsylvania/ New York State border. Her heritage is half-Persian, which is rare in the ballet world. As it is currently illegal to dance in her father’s home county of Iran, Katia is grateful to have grown up where she could pursue her love of dancing and experience the magic of the stage which could never have happened if she were born in her father’s country. America is now, unexpectedly, her place “to make new dreams.” Katia began her classical ballet training with Rafael Grigorian and continued her training at the Kirov Academy of Ballet of Washington, DC. Upon graduation from the Kirov Academy, Katia received an invitation to study at the Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia, but she was unable to attend due to financial reasons, and she began her professional career with the Gelsey Kirkland Ballet in New York City. Katia still dreamed of traveling to Russia and watching a performance at the Marinsky Theatre— she never imagined that she would one day move to Russia and go on to dance on the Mariinsky stage after joining the Yacobson Ballet Theatre in St. Petersburg. Throughout her professional career, Raj has received coaching by world renowned artists including Ulyana Lopatkina, Irina Kolpakova, Gelsey Kirkland, and Ivan Nagy, and has performed on tours around the world. Some of her favorite roles in her repertoire include the Lilac Fairy in The Sleeping Beauty, Queen of the Dryads in Don Quixote, Pierrette in Harlequinade, Spanish in Swan Lake, and the Queen Mekhmene Banu monologue from Legend of Love, for which she was coached by Uliana Lopatkina.
Raj credits much of her training to Ekaterina Shchelkanova and Anton Boytsov, former dancers of the Mariinsky Theatre, who coached her while in NYC and in Russia. Raj found out about the war when she happened to be back home in the States, with plans to return to Russia a couple of weeks later. All of a sudden, her future plans were shattered with the invasion. She has since never returned-she misses her friends and her life there and has had to let go of the majority of her belongings, which remain in Russia. “This opportunity to perform together in Reunited in Dance has meant an immense amount to me. I have missed the feeling of community and connection that exists within a company. More than that, this group of people has this shared experience of dancing and living in Russia: we were on stage all year performing in hundreds of ballets; we were living in cities full of history and art; and we were fully immersed in the culture—we all understand the loss of what we left behind. The opportunity to perform and be onstage is always a gift; but to be sharing the stage with these incredible artists and to come together at this critical point both in history and in all of our lives has been very inspiring.
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