Emma Smith (Faculty, Repertoire) – Emma has studied ballet with the Greenville Ballet School, International Ballet Academy, and was a student at the Fine Arts Center.  In 2017, she attended the American Dance Festival’s three week summer intensive at Duke University.  Emma has performed in multiple ballet productions including several roles in The Nutcracker and Coppelia with the Greenville Ballet. She was also a cast member with The Logos Theatre in their most recent productions of “The Horse and His Boy”, “A Peep Behind the Scenes”, and “The Scarlet Pimpernel.”

 Elizabeth Updegraff  (Faculty, Ballet) – trained at the San Diego School of Ballet under the guidance of Robin Morgan. Then at the age of fourteen she was asked by Lola De Avila of the San Francisco Ballet to come and study with the ballet school under full scholarship. She stayed at SFB for three years as a student and apprentice with the company. Jillana, one of George Balanchine’s protégés, became her mentor and selected her for her first major role as Dewdrop when she was just fifteen. After being invited to return to the San Diego Ballet as a principle dancer, Elizabeth spent the bulk of her career dancing in classical roles and contemporary works created for her by artistic director Javier Velasco. In 1996 Elizabeth was chosen by Baryshnikov to appear on the first cover of his newly started catalog, Baryshnikov Dancewear. She has also been featured as a model in Dance Magazine on several occasions, and in one instance Dance Magazine published a review of her and the late Ricardo Peralta’s lead performance in Opus Swing, a ballet set to the music of Duke Ellington performed in the San Diego Ballet’s 1997 season. Anne Marie Welsh, dance critic for the San Diego Union Tribune, once wrote: “Apgar’s got legs out to here and real magnetism. She demands attention in every role.” Elizabeth appeared as a ballet dancer in the NBC TV movie Jonathan, the Boy Nobody Wanted, and she danced in the West Coast Emmy Awards hosted by David Caradine. She has also choreographed ballet pieces that have been performed by professional and pre-professional dancers. The Triangle Incident is one of her favorites, a ballet in three acts based on the devastating fire at the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory in New York. That ballet was performed in June 2007 at the San Diego Ballet Company. Elizabeth has been teaching ballet for over twenty years and loving every minute of it. She has taught for schools in San Diego, Long Beach, Orange County, and Riverside, California, and also in Columbia, Missouri, instructing professionals as well as students ranging from adult beginners to kids as young as three. Before returning to teach in southern California, Elizabeth was the ballet mistress at the Missouri Contemporary Ballet Company. She joined the faculty at Riverside Ballet Arts in 2014 and stayed there until moving to South Carolina in 2021. Now as an Instructor of Dance at Anderson University, she loves teaching and having the opportunity to choreograph new works on her students.