Courtney Lyon, Artistic Director, received her early ballet training from Nathalie LeVine in St. Louis and earned her BFA with Honors in Dance from the University of Iowa, where she studied ballet under Francoise Martinet, Edward Ellison and Susan Toumine. She received additional training from mentor Arleen Sugano, the Joffrey Ballet School and the Milwaukee Ballet School. She performed across the Midwest with Dancers in the Company, with the Milwaukee Ballet in Who Cares? and The Four Temperaments, and Lisa deRibere's The Nutcracker, and as a soloist in the 2001 Dallas Morning News Dance Festival. She served as a ballet demonstrator for Kenneth Laws and Arleen Sugano, co-authors of The Physics and the Art of Dance: Understanding Movement during three of the Performing Arts Medicine Association's annual symposium in Aspen, CO. As a performer with Ballet Quad Cities, she enjoyed featured roles in former Artistic Director Johanne Jakhelln's productions of The Sleeping Beauty, Romeo and Juliet: 21st Century, and Cinderella, among others, as well as contemporary roles in pieces by guest choreographers including Dominic Walsh, Simone Ferro, and Jeffery Bullock.
Since retiring from performing, she has served as Assistant to the Project Manager in 2006 for One River Mississippi, Ballet mistress and Associate Director of Ballet Quad Cities, and Co-director of Ballet Quad Cities II. Her choreography for Ballet Quad Cities includes three children's ballets: The Three Little Pigs, The Ugly Duckling, and Peter and the Wolf, as well as Blush, which premiered in February 2008's Dance Piano Extraordinaire, 2009 and 2010’s The Nutcracker, and Blue Moon which premiered in 2011’s Love Stories. Her choreography has also been seen in 2010’s Holiday Pops at the iwireless Center. She has re-staged many works for Ballet Quad Cities, including Jahelln's Romeo and Juliet: 21st Century, Prelude to Eternity and Making Waves. As an outreach coordinator for Ballet Quad Cities, she has created curriculum for and led month-long artist residencies in Illinois public elementary schools that include collaborations with dancers, musicians, and local visual artists, culminating in performances open to the community. She received a Quad City Arts individual artist grant for original choreography for Peter and the Wolf and has partnered with Davenport School's Great Minds for an anti-bullying campaign supported by her children's ballet The Ugly Duckling. Recently Ms. Lyon participated in the Kennedy Center's Artists as Educators Seminars Laying a Foundation: Defining Arts integration and Anatomy of a Lesson: Planning Instruction.
To support her teaching of classical ballet technique, Ms. Lyon has completed two pedagogue courses that involved study of the 1st through 5th years of the Vaganova syllabus with John White, an authority of the Vaganova teaching method and former dancer and Ballet master of the National Ballet of Cuba, as well as intensive training exploring the bio-mechanics of movement with physicist Kenneth Laws and Arleen Sugano. As a principal faculty member at BQC School of Dance, she has created and implemented a comprehensive syllabus for young students.
Ms. Lyon is also a requested keynote speaker for civic groups throughout the Quad Cities area, and has been a quest speaker on several arts related radio programs. She recently premiered her all new Cinderella for Ballet Quad Cities at the Adler Theater in April 2011 and was chosen as a choreographer for the 2011 Glenda Brown Choreography Project.