AMANDA MCKERROW has enjoyed a career as one of America’s acclaimed ballerinas. She has the honor of being the first American to receive a gold medal at the International Ballet Competition in Moscow in 1981. Since then, she has been the recipient of numerous other awards, among them the Princess Grace Foundation Dance Fellowship and the New York Woman Award for Dance.

McKerrow was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and began her ballet training at the Twinbrook School of Ballet in Rockville, Maryland, where she completed the syllabus of the Royal Academy of Dance. She then spent two years at the Metropolitan Academy of Dance where she studied the Vaganova syllabus. She then attended the Washington School of Ballet under the direction of Mary Day, where she trained and danced with the company for four years, ultimately touring extensively throughout the United States and Europe.

McKerrow then joined American Ballet Theatre in 1982 under the direction of Mikhail Baryshnikov. She was appointed Soloist in 1983, and promoted to the rank of Principal Dancer in 1987. Her repertoire included the leading roles in all the major classics and she was also acclaimed for her performances in works by many of the major choreographers of the time including Antony Tudor, George Balanchine, Sir Frederick Ashton, Sir Kenneth MacMillan, Jerome Robbins and Juri Killian. She has also created roles in ballets by choreographers such as Agnes DeMille, Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris, Clark Tippet, Choo San Goh and James Kudelka. She has also appeared as a Guest Artist with ballet companies around the world.

In 2000, after having worked closely with him during his lifetime McKerrow began staging the works of Antony Tudor as a Repetiteur for the Antony Tudor Ballet Trust. She was appointed the Sole Trustee of his ballets in 2018. She also stages the ballets of Agnes DeMille, Clark Tippet and Benjamin Millepied, as well as the full-length classics such as Swan Lake, Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty and Don Quixote. After retiring from performing in 2006 she has devoted her time to teaching, coaching and staging ballets for professional companies and educational institutions around the world. She is married to fellow dancer and repetiteur John Gardner, and together they have directed many workshops and intensives including “From Studio to Stage” at The Hartt School at the University of Hartford in 2016 and the Colorado Ballet Academy Summer Intensive from 2018 to 2021. She is currently a Guest Repetiteur for American Ballet Theatre.