Maxfield Haynes (dancer)

Maxfield Haynes is a Queer, Afro-Latine polyglottal artist and performer, with roots in the South, West Coast, and Brooklyn/LES. Their professional career as a dancer at age 16 with the Louisville Ballet under Bruce Simpson, and continued on through full merit scholarships to attend professional schools such as the San Francisco Ballet School (David Palmer Foundation Scholar) for the remainder of their high school years, as well as the Houston Ballet Academy, Dance Theatre of Harlem School, and HAMU Performing Arts University in Prague, Czech Republic. They received their Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Dance from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2018, where they had a concentration is Social and Cultural Analysis, Russian Language Studies, and completed an MFA course in Dance Pedagogy under Sean Curran and Pamela Pietro.

After graduating Tisch, they joined Complexions Contemporary Ballet for their 25th anniversary season as a soloist dancer touring domestically and internationally. Other company work includes time with Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Dance Heginbotham, Ballet 22, and Ballez. They were named on Dance Magazine’s Top 25 to watch list in 2022, and that same year made an exciting debut at the Metropolitan Opera House as the first nonbinary “Prima Ballerina” to perform the soloist role of “The White Bird” en pointe in Julie Taymor’s The Magic Flute. Their work as a choreographer has been featured at Lincoln Center, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Guggenheim Works and Process, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They have been featured in the New York Times, Berliner Zeitung, Broadway World, Dance Magazine, Pointe Magazine, Dance Spirit, and on the cover of New York Magazine.

Some performances of the past year include Zefferelli’s Turandot, Isaac Mizrahi’s Peter and The Wolf & Third Bird at the Guggenheim Works and Process, The Magic Flute, and Tannhäuser at the Met Opera, Matthew Lutz Kinoy’s revival of the Lew Christiansen classic Filling Station presented by The Kitchen NYC, and collaborating on Jacolby Satrerwhite’s A Metta Prayer presented in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Upcoming shows include touring across the US, UK, and Brazil with Emmy, Grammy, and Tony award winning artist Billy Porter. They can be found everywhere @itsmaxfield.