Briefly about myself,
Through a stroke of luck, I came to enjoy a long, international career in classical dance. I grew up in the South Bronx in the late 1980s and 90s in a single-parent home. Then, when I was seven years old, my family was evicted from our home and we were suddenly homeless. After a difficult first few days, we moved into a NYC homeless shelter for women and children, where we stayed for three years. It was in the shelter that I was introduced to classical ballet.
For over 25 years, ballet took me around the world before eventually bringing me back to the United States, where I served in artistic director roles at National Dance Institute New Mexico and New York Theatre Ballet. In those roles, I oversaw performances, supported artists, and led community programs designed to create opportunities for others. In 2025, I co-founded Troublemaker: Public Works to connect talent to opportunity and to ensure that my story becomes ordinary.
FULL BIOGRAPHY
PUBLIC SPEAKING
LIFT Documentary Film
The 2024 Emmy Nominated documentary filmed over ten years, LIFT, shines a spotlight on the invisible story of homelessness in America through the eyes of a group of young homeless and home-insecure ballet dancers in New York City. After performing all over the world, ballet dancer Steven Melendez returns to the Bronx shelter where he grew up to give back to his community, offering a New York Theatre Ballet workshop to children. His traumatic reaction to the shelter from his childhood sends him on an unexpected journey with three kids to reckon with a past he escaped through ballet. As young dance students, Victor, Yolanssie, and Sharia face the same chasm of home insecurity that long separated Steven from his audience and makes the arts inaccessible to so many children who share his background. The children he mentors offer him insight into turning a hidden trauma into dance, and together they make an aristocratic art form into an expression all their own.
