For centuries, ballet’s elite have emerged from prestigious academies in New York, London, Moscow and Paris. San Diego County — better known for the beach, burritos and biotech — has not been part of that esteemed pipeline, at least not until recently.In a Kearny Mesa studio, located off Ruffner Street, the San Diego Academy of Ballet & Ballet Theater has quietly cultivated and sent a string of students to the world’s most competitive ballet programs. While she doesn’t share enrollment numbers, Simone Gabrielle, SDAB’s executive director and director of operations, said the local ballet nonprofit is thriving.
Photo of San Diego Academy of Ballet – Courtesy of Simone GabrielleGabrielle uses the term “artistic drafting” to describe what’s been happening at the Kearny Mesa dance academy, where students aren’t just auditioning for the world’s most prestigious ballet institutions; they are being actively recruited by them.Since taking over in 2021, Gabrielle and the school have placed nearly a dozen dancers at prestigious institutions such as the Paris Opera Ballet School, the Royal Ballet School, SAB (the training academy for the New York City Ballet), American Ballet Theater and the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet.In 2025, a 10-year-old from the San Diego Academy of Ballet was accepted to four top programs in the same season.San Diego dancers have “not traditionally been on that map,” Gabrielle said.San Diego Academy of Ballet offers about 20 classes a week for kids 3 and up, and Gabrielle said that families travel long distances, with some relocating, to have their children train at SDAB.
The business of ballet
SDAB’s teaching methods are informed by Gabrielle’s life, navigating the space between artistic tradition and professional pragmatism.Gabrielle grew up in Point Loma and trained under SDAB co-founder Sylvia Tchernychev at California Ballet. She did a “détourné” from dance at 17 to attend UC Santa Barbara. When she eventually came back to San Diego, Tchernychev — who started SDAB in 2001 with her former partner Max Tchernychev — encouraged Gabrielle to return to her roots.“Had I not been trained by the founders, I would not be in a position to impart that training,” Gabrielle said. “I am incredibly sensitive and deferential to that legacy.”Gabrielle has built on the classical Vaganova method — the Russian system that fuses athletic power with soulful artistry — while reshaping nearly everything else around it into a model that works for her six-member staff and founder Tchernychev alike.
SDAB takes no outside donors or grants
Every new student pays a one-time registration fee of $55; full tuition details are listed on the school’s website. SDAB also runs adult classes on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Friday mornings at $30 a class. It’s “Sunday Funday” drop-in classes for beginner and intermediate adults start at $15.According to its 2025 tax filings, the nonprofit generated $463,381 in total revenue, ending the year with a $36,973 surplus. With more than $105,000 in assets and negligible debt, SDAB is proving that elite artistry and fiscal discipline are not mutually exclusive.The school runs year-round, with no summer break.“If kids are off for the summer, I get balls of clay back in September,” Gabrielle said. “I’d rather keep the engine oiled.”Gabrielle also refuses to run competitions — a stance that costs revenue but keeps the school’s priorities clear.“Ballet competitions have created another industry within the art form,” she said. “It has become the bread and butter of a lot of studios — get into the competition, train for the competition, require parents to pay for private lessons, costumes, travel. For us, that model does not work. Creating a competitive element to an art form like ballet tends to deviate from the personal development of the dancer.”Financial independence means Gabrielle can be a straight shooter with parents about whether their child has a realistic shot at a career. When the answer is no, she says so.“What does a kid have at 18 if they’ve paid 14 years of tuition with no real shot?” she said. “They have unemployment. I won’t do that.”There are also no free rides for boy dancers.In most ballet schools, boys get free or heavily discounted tuition because studios are desperate to keep them. A 2019 Forbes report found that girls outnumber boys in youth ballet by about 20 to 1; a national study found that while 35 percent of girls report dancing as a regular activity, under 9 percent of boys do.According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and organizations like CareerExplorer and the Dance Data Project, estimates for a “Dancer and Choreographer” job category typically show women making up between 75 percent and 87 percent of the industry.“I charge every boy full tuition. I don’t care,” Gabrielle said.For years, the boys’ program at SDAB struggled with interest and retention under male coaches, so in 2025, Gabrielle took it over herself, and there has been a resurgence of male interest and renewed dedication to the craft.
Focus and strong landings
SDAB groups students by technical readiness and potential, not birth year — a deliberate break from how almost every other school or athletic program operates.“Most teaching structures, not just in ballet but in elite sports and traditional child development, are organized by age,” Gabrielle said. “I am committed to ambition and potential instead.”For example, a 10-year-old who swept auditions this season had been trained well above her age group for years.“I treated her training as something much more advanced because she was ready for it,” Gabrielle said.The classroom at SDAB is intentionally unpredictable. Gabrielle believes challenge sharpens focus.“If everything is very easy and rote, the brain doesn’t get as much of a holistic investment in the activity,” she said.It is with parents that Gabrielle is most blunt.She has cut ties more than once with families who try to manage from the sidelines, comparing unsolicited input to a patient offering surgical advice mid-operation. The children who find the most success, she said, have parents who “stay in the wings and let the child captain their own ship.”“Children need stronger wings, not softer landings,” she said. “If a parent is always absolving the child of the grit required to get to those apex levels, it won’t work.”Beyond her studio, Gabrielle has a broader vision and has taken some bold stances. She acknowledges personal frustration that San Diego’s professional dance scene is fragmented, with multiple small companies that struggle to pay dancers a living wage.“It’s quite tragic that they can’t organize and unite and form one strong company,” she said. “It would help eliminate the fragmentation of audiences. As someone who runs a school, I should traditionally be feeding local companies. I intentionally do not do that. Those dancers can’t even survive.”So instead, she sends them elsewhere. The French, she noted, rarely pay attention to American schools — let alone one from San Diego.“They don’t usually care about us,” she said. “But somehow, we’ve gotten children into the Paris Opera Ballet School three times.”She paused on what the full picture of success for her students actually takes.“It takes a lot of work to take a ball of clay and not only turn them into a dancer — which is physically opposite of how humans function — but to ensure they are ‘outlier’ enough to turn a head in a room of 50 dancers from all over the world.”
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