(April 9, 2026) In a form that has historically drawn its lines around Europe and America, ballet has had little room for geographies like India. Nayanika Vyas, who has been living in the United States since 2015, has built her career within that space, moving from an unlikely starting point in New Delhi to one of its most influential institutions.
The New Delhi native is now based in New York City, where she has ben working for the last two years as a performing artist and a teaching artist with the New York City Ballet. She is the first Indian artist ever to hold that distinction in the company’s more than seven decade history.
“Being associated with such an iconic institution felt like a distant dream coming true,” she tells The Global Indian. “It’s incredibly meaningful to contribute to a company of that stature while also representing my background and journey as an Indian artist.”
What the New York City Ballet represents
The New York City Ballet is a cornerstone of American ballet and a globally recognised institution with a lasting impact on the field. Founded in 1948 by choreographer George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, it was built to give America a ballet tradition that could stand alongside Europe’s finest. It did exactly that. Today, it is the largest dance organisation in the United States and is considered among the most important ballet companies in the world.
In the 78 years since its inception, no Indian artist has held a teaching position there. Nayanika is the first to do so. “Navigating a field where Indian representation, especially in ballet, remains limited has shaped both my artistic voice and my commitment to education and access,” she says.
Moving to Philadelphia, building a career, and revisiting the classroom
Nayanika moved to the United States in 2015, shortly after completing school, to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance. She enrolled at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, a conservatory-style institution situated on the Avenue of the Arts in Center City, long regarded as one of America’s leading homes for serious dance training. Its School of Dance, led by Dean Donna Faye Burchfield, under whose direction Nayanika studied, was known for producing graduates who went on to join companies like Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Mark Morris Dance Company, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and others. The school’s philosophy has been to train thinking artists, not just technically able ones.
Nayanika was awarded both the International Presidential and the Dean’s Scholarship, covering all four years of her education. She trained in classical ballet, modern, contemporary, and jazz, and performed in works by choreographers including Eryc Taylor, Sidra Bell, Jesse Zaritt, and Jimena Paz. She graduated in 2019, also holding a Minor in Business, a pairing that hinted at the larger institution-building ambitions she already carried.
After graduating, she spent several years focused on building her performance career while also teaching, before returning to formal study. She is now at Hunter College, one of the City University of New York’s flagship campuses, working toward her Master’s in Dance Education.
“I love teaching just as much as I love performing,” she says. “Training the next generation of dancers is incredibly fulfilling. I strongly believe that teaching in the arts requires as much rigor and intention as any other field.”
Ballet in Delhi: An unlikely pursuit
Nayanika’s entry into dance was through her father who played music on weekends and a little girl who couldn’t stand still. “Some of my earliest memories are of dancing at home while my dad played music — Michael Jackson, ABBA, all the golden hits,” she recalls. Her mother enrolled her in classes at The Danceworx Performing Arts Academy in Delhi around the age of five, where she began training in jazz and ballet.
The Danceworx, founded in 1998 by choreographer Ashley Lobo, is one of India’s most established Western dance academies, and an institution that built its curriculum around classical ballet, contemporary, and jazz at a time when these forms were barely on India’s cultural radar. It runs studios across Delhi and Mumbai and, notably, houses a professional Student Repertory Company that offers advanced training alongside international faculty. For a young girl in Delhi, it was an unusually serious place to learn an unusually serious art form.
Ballet in India occupied, and still occupies, an odd, niche corner. In a country with one of the world’s richest classical dance traditions like Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Odissi and more, Western forms like ballet were far from widely understood. “What drew me in was the discipline and beauty of the form — the precision of movement, honing the technique, and eventually, the artistry of dancing en pointe,” Nayanika says. “Training in these styles brought me a great sense of joy and purpose.”
She trained through her school years at Delhi Public School, Noida, working her way into the professional repertoire company at The Danceworx. “After performing in a summer showcase just a few months into training, I fell in love with being on stage — and that’s where it all began.”
The making of a professional
At 15, Nayanika was cast as the youngest dancer in Jhumroo, a large-scale musical staged at the Kingdom of Dreams in Gurugram, among the first professional productions of its kind in India, choreographed by Ashley Lobo himself. She went on to perform in over a hundred shows. “The experience of being part of a professional production with costumes, hair and makeup artists, quick changes, styling, and live performance energy was truly such a dream,” she says. “I was one of the youngest cast members.”
She managed those rehearsals alongside the high-stakes academic years of Class 11 and 12, not without difficulty. She struggled with her grades for a stretch before deciding to impose a rigorous discipline on herself, squeezing dance rehearsals and studies into the same days, often staying up through the night. She graduated with strong board scores, and more importantly, with the knowledge of what she was capable of under pressure. It was a blueprint she would return to.
Fifty auditions and what came after
After passing out of school, Nayanika moved to New York City, and then the real work of becoming a professional dancer began. “I auditioned for months,” she says matter-of-factly. She was usually the only non-white, non-American, non-tall face in those rooms. “I pursued resilience day after day and was determined to be victorious.” After auditioning for close to fifty companies, she signed a contract with Bloodline Dance Theatre, a contemporary ballet company. A subsequent contract with Ajna, a company rooted in Indian dance, followed. The range of both affiliations reflects her artistic breadth, and her refusal to be boxed into a single identity.
Alongside her performance work, Nayanika now teaches in New York City public schools under Arts in Education and after-school programmes, fingerprinted by the Department of Education. She works with Young Dancers in Repertory, DMF Youth, and Ajna Dance.
Staying rooted while reaching forward
The inspiration Nayanika names when asked about her influences is telling: Akram Khan, the British-Bangladeshi choreographer whose work weaves together kathak, contemporary dance, and an acute storytelling sensibility. “His work is consistently profound, deeply expressive, and executed with remarkable precision,” she says. “I hope to one day build something of my own with that kind of depth and impact,” she remarks.
That ambition to build something runs through everything she describes about her future. “I plan to open my own dance studio and build a performing company,” she says. “My long-term vision is to contribute to building stronger, more accessible pathways for dance education, particularly in ballet and contemporary forms while remaining rooted in my cultural identity.”
That last phrase is the thread connecting all of it. The girl in New Delhi who found herself in a jazz class, the teenager holding her own on a professional stage, the young woman who showed up to audition number forty-nine when forty-eight had already said no, and the artist who now walks into one of the world’s great ballet institutions as the first Indian teaching artist to do so with something entirely her own to offer.
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