Breaking records and bread at the Atlanta Ballet’s 2025 Fashion Show & Luncheon

It was an afternoon of glitz and glam, of high fashion and high spirits. On Monday, October 20, 2025, the ballroom at the St. Regis in Buckhead hosted the 27th annual Corps de Ballet Fashion Show and Luncheon. The event, which was co-chaired by Sineet Berhane and Erica Thomas, enlisted some of Atlanta’s most avid ballet fans, including Mayor André Dickens, who addressed the crowd and affirmed the city’s support for the arts. 

“The Atlanta Ballet is the oldest continuously operating ballet company in America,” he said, receiving cheers from the crowd. “For [almost] a century, it has been a part of this city’s cultural identity, gracefully telling our story one performance at a time. The Ballet makes it easy to see why the art of dance continues to move hearts and, really, open minds.”

Beyond the fabulous outfits, the stunning runway walk featuring looks from the Akris Fall/Winter 2025 collection presented by Neiman Marcus, silent and live auctions and the performance of Handle With Flair put on by Atlanta Ballet 2 dancers, there was a deeper story at play here. For 27 years, the Corps de Ballet has presented this annual event to fund scholarships and community engagement programs, including the Atlanta Ballet Centre for Dance Education’s Decade 2 Dance initiative. 

Sharon Story, dean of Centre for Dance Education at the Atlanta Ballet, explained that, for most dancers, it takes an average of 10 years of continuous education to become a professional dancer. The Decade 2 Dance program is designed to provide 10 years of ongoing support to budding dancers as young as 8 years old from under-represented communities through mentorship, training and academic support.  

“The main part it plays in the ecosystem is the fundraising for scholarships,” said Story, an accomplished dancer who performed for over 20 years at institutions including The Joffrey Ballet, the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet, Atlanta Ballet and the Boston Ballet. “I had a long career, but I never would have become a professional dancer without the scholarships,” Story shared. 

Since she became dean of the Centre in 1996, Story has made it a mission to provide opportunities to emerging dancers, and she does so by overseeing the community engagement programs in Boys and Girls Clubs, Fulton County, Cobb County and city of Atlanta schools and between 1,200 and 1,500 students in the Centre itself. In 2024, the Centre offered more than $166,000 in scholarships to young dancers. 

“Most of the arts are taken out of the schools now, but we are the special that goes in,” said Story. She explained that the program offers daily dance classes to kids from kindergarten through fifth grade, and those efforts are entirely funded by the Atlanta Ballet. “It’s super important,” she asserted. “The Corps de Ballet is an integral part of what we do and supporting what we do.”

Tom West, executive director of the Atlanta Ballet, emphasized just how respected Story is in the dance industry and how crucial her work has been to connect the company with local schools and organizations through partnerships like these. “It’s part of the survival of the art form,” said West. “Dance is integral to our experience as humans.” 

West brings a lifetime love for performing arts and an impressive career spanning more than 25 years in arts management to his role at the Atlanta Ballet. He shared that he first fell in love with theater as a young boy growing up in Nashville who was bussed in to see performances at the War Memorial Auditorium. Even then, access to the arts in public schools was limited, and today funding cuts continue to jeopardize what exposure kids have to the arts. He sees the Atlanta Ballet’s scholarships, school programs and community engagements as an essential part of the dance scene here. 

As Story explained, there are additional benefits to producing ongoing youth programs in dance. Not only does it help young, emerging dancers find their way — it also serves to identify and train the next generation of dancers who might one day join the Atlanta Ballet or similar companies as professional dancers. Story does so by ensuring that there is an accessible, supportive and non-competitive atmosphere for all who participate in the Atlanta Ballet.

“The profession is so difficult that the minute you put competition in there, when you pit people against each other, it puts so much pressure on dancers,” said Story. “It’s in the atmosphere from the top down. We are here to support each other. We are here to lift each other up, not to tear each other down. This is part of our culture.” 

West affirmed that the importance of a non-competitive atmosphere is supported not only by leaders such as Story but by the dancers themselves. In 2022, the Atlanta Ballet evaluated dancer compensation and decided to eliminate the apprentice program in favor of a structure that offered full company membership and pay to all new entry-level dancers. The company consulted with the dancers on the best approach to this change and worked together to build a new system. “We are hopefully creating a new generation, a new style, and a lot of that comes from Sharon,” said West. “I’m a fan.”

Corps de Ballet Board Chair Jacqueline Flake has been involved with the program for around eight years in various capacities, and she spoke with ArtsATL about the initiative’s two major impacts: fundraising and friendraising. Members pay an annual $150 membership fee to be part of the Corps and contribute to Atlanta Ballet’s mission through advocacy, volunteerism and fundraising. The benefits of joining include access to four exclusive events such as in-studio rehearsals, dress rehearsals and special tea and cocktail parties. Not only does this program raise essential funds for the Ballet, it also brings together like-minded dance lovers and builds community, providing an opportunity for connection and friendship.

Flake said the process of planning the annual luncheon takes around 11 months total. For the past 15 years, Neiman Marcus has been the event’s presenting sponsor, and Flake explained that they do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to working with a local designers, enlisting models and putting on the fashion show element of the event. The co-chairs likewise often bring in many friends who buy tickets for the event, thereby supporting the overall event’s fundraising capacity. Flake said that typically around one-third of the money is raised during the auctions of the event itself, with the other two-thirds being in the form of ticket sales.”You have to get people there, get people excited and get people sitting in the audience who are willing to raise their paddles and donate.”

The money raised from the 2025 Corps de Ballet Fashion Show and Luncheon totaled a whopping $455,150, continuing its trend of breaking fundraising records each year for the past three years. For West, it’s not only the money raised but also the new faces in the crowd that informs the success of the event. “The most important metric for me is who did we meet?” 

For an organization as storied as the Atlanta Ballet to continue to thrive, it must remain relevant to longtime supporters and provide accessible outreach to new followers as well. Describing the annual Fashion Show and Luncheon as a “gateway for getting involved with the Ballet in a fun way,” he ensures that the programming also includes videos that showcase the behind-the-scenes work of the company, plus a live dance performance that provides essential exposure to the artform itself, even if it is performed on the somewhat precarious footprint of a runway. “It’s really who we meet,” said West.

::

Isadora Pennington is senior editor of art + design and dance. An experienced writer and photographer with a deep love for the arts, Isadora founded the Sketchbook newsletter with Rough Draft Atlanta in 2022. She is also president of the Avondale Arts Alliance and director of the Avondale Arts Center.