Pacific Northwest Ballet Principal Maria Chapman Retires

After 20 years with the company, Maria Chapman has retired from Pacific Northwest Ballet. The principal, who has been with PNB for her entire professional career, plans to focus her energies on her daughter Eleanor.

Chapman has danced an astonishingly wide range of PNB’s repertoire, tackling choreography by George Balanchine, Ulysses Dove, David Dawson, Jiri Kylian, Jerome Robbins, William Forsythe, Crystal Pite, Alexei Ratmansky, Twyla Tharp, Christopher Wheeldon and more. She also helped to launch Second Stage for Dancers, which is PNB’s career transition program.

While her retirement comes as an abrupt surprise, Chapman will go out on a high note. Her last show was PNB’s mixed bill, in which she danced three out of the four ballets, including Crystal Pite’s Emergence, Kiyon Gaines’ Sum Stravinsky, and company member Price Suddarth’s Signature.