Niurka Moredo

Biography

Born in Puerto Rico, Niurka Moredo began her ballet training in San Juan with Nana Hudo. She continued her dance education at the School of Southern Ballet Theater in Orlando, Florida and later joined that company. In 1990 she became a member of the Royal Danish Ballet, dancing solo roles in the Bournonville repertoire as well as in the ballets of George Balanchine and John Neumeier among others. In 1995 Ms. Moredo joined the Hamburg Ballet, and was promoted soloist in 2000. She danced numerous solo roles in important Neumeier ballets such as Nijinsky, The Odyssey, The Lady of the Camelias, As You Like It, Le Sacre, Vaslav, Saint Matthew Passion, and the Third and Fifth Symphony of Gustav Mahler. With John Neumeier she created the roles of Polina Andreyevna in The Seagull, Heather in Preludes CV, and leading roles in his Messiah and Winterreise. In the course of her career, she also danced the works of John Cranko and Jiří Kylián and worked with choreographers such as Stephan Thoss, Kevin Haigen, Gustavo Sansano, and Petr Zuska. Ms. Moredo danced Aurora and created the role of Ruby Fairy in Mats Ek’s Sleeping Beauty. She was featured in Donya Feuer’s dance film The Working of Utopia, and in the year 2000 Ms. Moredo was awarded the Dr. Wilhelm Oberdörffer Prize.

Having retired as a dancer in 2007, Niurka became a Rehearsal Director of the Hamburg Ballet working on nearly the entire repertoire in the choreographer’s catalogue. Apart from her work with the company in Hamburg, she has staged many of Neumeier’s ballets throughout the world for the San Francisco Ballet, the Stanislavsky Ballet Moscow, the Bavarian State Ballet, the National Ballet of China, the Polish National Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Houston Ballet, the Vienna State Ballet, the Finnish National Ballet, and the Korean National Ballet.