Lanette Costas is a dance educator, performer, choreographer, and mentor whose career spans concert dance, musical theater, television, and higher education, both nationally and internationally. She is a graduate of New York City’s LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, earned a BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA through the Hollins University/American Dance Festival program. With more than 15 years of teaching experience, she has guest lectured and taught master classes at institutions and dance programs across the United States.

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Ms. Costas will begin teaching at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University this fall. She currently serves on the year-round faculty of Ballet Tech and The Ailey School, where she teaches ballet in the Professional Division, Junior Division, and Professional Performing Arts School. Most recently, she served on the summer faculty of the School of American Ballet and Ballet Hispánico, where she taught for three years in the Summer Intensive Program. Prior to this, she spent eight years on the faculty of the University of the Arts Pre-College Summer Institute. 

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Her professional concert dance credits include Ailey II, Donald Byrd/The Group, Elisa Monte Dance, Fred Benjamin Dance Company, and Earl Mosley’s Diversity of Dance. She was also a featured dancer in Disney’s The Lion King. Her additional theater credits include choreographing Five Guys Named Moe for Skylight Music Theatre, serving as Dance Captain for Tin Pan Alley Rag at Maltz Jupiter Theatre, and working as choreographic assistant to Tony Award-winning choreographer George Faison on If This Hat Could Talk.

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Ms. Costas has performed in the CBS broadcast of the Kennedy Center Honors, dancing in tribute to Judith Jamison. She toured internationally as a soloist with the Spiritual Singers of Harlem and performed as a dancer for the NBA’s New Jersey Nets. As a member of Resident Artists: Assembled, she performed at Danspace Project and the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

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Ms. Costas has performed, taught, and conducted workshops at Lawrence University. She was a guest instructor at Rowan University and is a School of American Ballet National Visiting Fellow. These diverse experiences as a performer, choreographer, and educator continue to inform her artistic practice and commitment to cultivating the next generation of dancers.