Holly Stone

Holly Stone is a Greater Boston–based artist working across ballet, contemporary dance, ballroom, choreography, directing, filmmaking, and teaching. Raised in rural Vermont, Stone began intensive ballet training before turning to ballroom dance at seventeen. After joining the Syracuse University Ballroom Team as a competitive dancer in International Standard, Stone worked in the social and collegiate ballroom environments for five or six years—experience that shaped a critical understanding of how partner roles, studio culture, and competition structures ballroom bodies and relationships.

Stone completed a B.S. in Bioengineering and Neuroscience at Syracuse University (2010–2014), where they also served as founding coach of the Syracuse University Ballroom Team from 2012 through 2017. After working as a chemical engineer, Stone left the private sector in 2017 to pursue graduate dance training. At Florida State University (2017–2020), they earned an M.F.A. in performance and choreography. Their thesis project *Strange Loops* joined contemporary dance with theatrical projection to investigate how consciousness might emerge from discrete, repeated processes. Two short screen works—*Little Shoes, Big Frame* (2019) and *Made Manifest* (2021)—document Stone's interest in film and editing as choreographic tools.

Stone's original story ballet *The Queen of Nöri* (2019–2022) became a sustained creative project across Greater Boston and beyond. Boston Dance Alliance describes it as a contemporary ballet about a queen who turns to dark magic to protect her kingdom, using classical and contemporary movement to reconsider story ballet for the present day. The work appeared at Cambridge's Starlight Stage, Windhover Center for the Performing Arts, Boston Center for the Arts, and Palikū Theatre in Hawaiʻi, showing Stone's approach to inherited ballet forms as material for inquiry into leadership, power, and narrative ethics.

In Greater Boston, Stone has performed and created across concert dance, opera, musical theatre, and education. Credits include work with Kathy Hassinger, Jo-Mé Dance Theater, Lowell House Opera, Tim Glenn, Boston Opera Collaborative, Greater Boston Stage Company, and A Common Thread Theater. Recent and ongoing projects include *Whispers: Echoes from the Halls* (2023), *Coming Back as a (Hu)man* (2023–2025), *A Queer Romance* (2024–2025), and *Thomas & Sally* (2025).

Stone's most distinctive partner-dance project is *Insider Ballroom*, created in collaboration with J Michael Winward. Winward describes it as a solo-turned-duet combining ballroom routines with storytelling about queer people navigating a heteronormative industry. Premiered at the Dance Complex and presented at Providence Fringe Festival, the work uses gender-expansive approaches to American Foxtrot, Tango, and social partnering, emphasizing communication, consent, and the possibility of exchanging rather than fixing leader and follower roles. The project has received support from the New England Foundation for the Arts, the JFK Foundation, and the City of Boston.

As of 2026, Stone is a lecturer in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Tufts University and also teaches at Boston University. Their course development includes ballroom for non-dance majors with equitable partnering and cultural literacy, alongside ballet, theatre, and "math for artists." Stone has offered free Pride community classes in partnered social dance and continues to perform *Insider Ballroom* at festivals and venues. This combination of university teaching, community access, and independent production situates Stone's work within a living regional dance ecology.