Fort Worth photographer publishes new children’s book “Brown Girls Do Ballet”

When TaKiyah Wallace-McMillian was looking for ballet classes for her daughter, she noticed a pattern. The majority of students and teachers at the ballet studios she found were white.

Not wanting her daughter to feel like an outsider the first time she walked into a ballet class, Wallace-McMillian set out to find and photograph dancers of color.

When she started taking photos for this project, the parents began to tell their stories.

“All the stories were the same,” Wallace-McMillian said. “It was the first time I had interacted with other dancing parents, other than taking my child to dance. And I didn’t realize that there was a need for other parents to want to see the same thing.”

She began documenting her project on social media and soon it went viral.

But on the way back from a photo shoot in Austin, a friend who had helped her style the shots said what Wallace-McMillian had been thinking: “Brown Girls Do Ballet” was more than just a photo project.

Wallace-McMillian founded a nonprofit organization and since 2013, Brown Girls Do Ballet has awarded 74 scholarships to dancers totaling over $99,000.

The organization also offers mentoring, community workshops and a dance school to give more children access to dance.

Wallace-McMillian was a public school teacher for nearly 20 years, retiring from teaching in 2023. That same year, she published her first book, a hardcover coffee table volume titled The Color of Dance: A Celebration of Diversity and Inclusion in the World of Ballet.

“I wanted more diverse options for my teaching. So when I was approached to do ‘The Color of Dance,'” she said, “I always had in the back of my mind that it would eventually become a children’s book.”

Pre-sales are underway for her next children’s book, “Brown Girls Do Ballet: Celebrating Diverse Girls Taking Center Stage,” which will be released August 27.

The mother of two can’t wait to start work on a third book, which she hopes will focus on adaptive dance, or classes available to dancers with autism, wheelchairs or prosthetics.

“When I think about inclusion, I can’t just think about it the way I’ve thought about it,” Wallace-McMillian said. “I have to think about comprehensive inclusion.”

Marcheta Fornoff covers arts and culture for The Fort Worth Report. Reach her at [email protected]. The Fort Worth Report makes news decisions independently of our board of directors. Read more about our editorial independence policy Here.

This article first appeared in the Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.