Anna Carapellotti is an American dancer, teacher, and scholar, and the visionary behind the Belfast International Ballet Festival. As a child, Anna trained at the Atlanta Ballet Centre for Dance Education and at summer intensives at numerous schools including American Ballet Theatre and Boston Ballet. At age 14, she joined the Pittsburgh Youth Ballet Company and School directed by Jean Gedeon in Pennsylvania. Anna began her professional career at Richmond Ballet in 2005. In 2008, she joined First State Ballet Theatre (FSBT) as a company member under the direction of Pasha and Kristina Kambalov. She has performed soloist roles in many classical ballets including The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Giselle, and Don Quixote, as well as in contemporary and neoclassical works such as George Balanchine’s Valse Fantasie and Serenade. From 2009 to 2017, she was a faculty member of the School of FSBT, which is ranked in the top 5% of ballet academies in the USA. Anna moved to Northern Ireland in 2017 and was a founding ballet teacher and répétiteur of High Points Youth Ballet’s (HPYB) pre-professional training programme developed by her husband, Jake Allison. Since 2018, she has staged classical repertoire on HPYB’s youth company, including selections from Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, Paquita Grand Pas Classique, Don Quixote, and Giselle, and coached dancers in classical variations to win national and international competitions. Anna has also studied the impact of dance on health for people living with Parkinson’s and Multiple Sclerosis as a Thouron and Fulbright Scholar, publishing her research findings in international journals and earning her PhD from Queen’s University Belfast in 2022.