Nicole Duffy

Nicole Duffy is a director and educator from San Juan, Puerto Rico. She danced with the Joffrey Ballet both in New York and in Chicago, touring and performing on some of the world’s foremost stages. As a repetiteur for the Gerald Arpino Foundation, she teaches the ballets and methodology of Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino, and has staged works for ABT Studio Company, Ballet Hispanico, Barnard College, Boston Conservatory, Chattanooga Ballet, Cincinnati Conservatory, and Marymount Manhattan College, to name a few. She holds a BA in Art History from Columbia University’s School of General Studies, and earned an MA in Dance and Art History from New York University’s Gallatin School, where she researched intersections between dance and visual art.

During her time with the Joffrey, she danced leading roles in ballets by Robert Joffrey, Gerald Arpino, Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, John Cranko, Agnes DeMille, Kurt Jooss, José Limon, Vicente Nebrada, and Ruth Page, and created roles in new contemporary works by Alonzo King, Anne Reinking, David Parsons, Laura Dean, and Randy Duncan, among many others. She was also featured in the Ballets Russes reconstructions, and performed in the original cast of the groundbreaking production Billboards, to music by Prince. 

Ms. Duffy trained with Ana Garcia and Maria Carrera at Ballets de San Juan, where she danced the 19th-c. classics, Balanchine repertory, new commissions by resident choreographer Ramon Molina, and worked with guest artists Fernando Bujones, Frederic Franklin, Melissa Hayden, and Ivan Nagy. She furthered her dance training at Alvin Ailey and the Joffrey Ballet School, where she later taught for many years. She is a guest teacher for STEPS on Broadway, Harlem School of the Arts, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, and Ballet Hispánico, and has directed summer intensives in Florence, Italy at the storied Hamlyn School. Teaching is her passion, and she enjoys mentoring dancers at all stages of their careers, both as artists and as humans.

Ms. Duffy is the assistant curator for the New York Public Library’s exhibition The Joffrey + Ballet in the US, and conducts interviews for the NYPL’s Dance Oral History Project. She was a panelist on NYU’s symposium The Alchemy and Effort of Restaging Dance, and her writing has been published in The Massachusetts Review, Eye on Dance and the Arts, Dance Informa, and Esferas. She is a member of the Columbia University Dance Studies Seminar and Latinx Dance Educators Alliance, and along with teaching her beloved Barnard students, she is delighted to serve as Program Advisor for the Upper Division and Professional Studies at Ballet Hispánico.