about
Leah’s passion for dance and choreography began in her childhood home, where her living room was her rehearsal (and performance) space and where her parents were her willing audience. While the living room, and parents, admittedly made for a pretty good set up, Leah eventually saw the need to explore dance outside of her immediate confines; she proceeded to spend the next five years training ballet in Oregon Ballet Theater’s pre-professional program. This comprehensive foundation in ballet ended up being extremely useful when, a few years after deciding that a life in ballet wasn’t quite the right fit, she discovered Aerial Straps. Straps provided the combination of physical rigor, requisite discipline, and creative demand that Leah had always craved. It was truly love at first sight and has now been an all-consuming fixation for the past decade. Straps has taken Leah to circus schools up and down the West Coast to train and to coach; to Montreal, where she received her most formative training with Cirque du Soleil straps specialist Chloé Farah; to local stages with companies such as Teatro Zinzanni Seattle and the Acrobatic Conundrum; and further away with companies such as Quixotic and Stufish Asia in Macau, China. Leah is currently based in Seattle, Washington, where her bread and butter is performing and coaching straps, training, choreographing, and collaborating with other artists.