Tess Voelker

Dancer and choreographer born in 1997 in San Francisco and grew up between Chicago and New Jersey. She began with jazz dance, then trained in ballet from the age of 11 with the Rock School for Dance Education and the Barbara Sandonato School of Ballet. After graduating at the Boston Walnut Hill School for the Arts, she trained at the Joffrey Ballet Chicago while spending her weekends studying improv methods at the CoCoDaCo, contemporary dance company founded by coach Ronn Stewart. During school age, she has gone on to win awards from both the YoungArts Foundation and Youth American Grand Prix. In 2016, she moved to Germany to join the Ballet Dortmund for a year before achieving her teenage dream of getting into the Netherlands Dans Theater company, where she's been dancing since 2017. In 2020, spotted by Aurélie Dupont, she got commissioned by the Paris Opéra Ballet to make her debut as a choreographer with a pas de deux, Clouds Inside (2021).