The school’s director, Jennifer Felkner, received her first eight years of professional ballet training in the Balanchine technique at the State Ballet of Missouri (now Kansas City Ballet) with Flora Klenklen and former New York City Ballet dancers Diana Adams and Una Kai, under the directorship of Todd Bolender. She simultaneously studied with Tatiana Dokoudovska at the School of Russian Ballet. Jennifer spent summers on scholarship at the Briansky Saratoga School in New York, working with Oleg Briansky, Suki Schorer and Violette Verdy, among others.
Later furthering her study of the Russian technique, Jennifer trained in Chicago with former Bolshoi Ballet soloist Dmitri Roudnev at the Roudnev Ballet of Chicago, where she also taught on the faculty. Moving on to dance in New York City, Jennifer studied intensively with former ABT principal Alexander Filipov and Kirill Matveev (formerly of the Kirov).
Jennifer has danced professionally with ballet companies in Texas, Chicago, and New York, and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from the Conservatory at the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC). For more than 15 years she has instructed students at all levels of training in the art of ballet. Her goal is to utilize the great traditions of the past to help create the great dancers of the future.
AUSTIN SCHOOL OF CLASSICAL BALLET 