Michaela DePrince at Despertares Mexico,
Photos by Nath Martin.
Michaela DePrince, born with vitiligo and deemed cursed by those around her, including an uncle, lost her father to rebel soldiers and her mother to starvation before she turned four. She was soon placed in an orphanage and assigned the “number 27” out of 27 children, a ranking suggesting she was last among others and least likely to be chosen for anything good. But even amidst these flooding chaos, a spark survived.
DePrince was born Mabinty Bangura in 1995, in war-torn Sierra Leone, a country bruised by colonialism and battling the violent tides of civil war. Her earliest years unfolded against the backdrop of starvation, refugee camps, and loss.
One day, a gust of wind blew a magazine through the gate of the orphanage. On its cover was a ballerina in pink tutu and pointed shoes graceful, poised, everything Mabinty had never been called. She didn’t know the dancer’s name, only that she looked powerful and had done a good job planting an impossible dream in Mabinty’s heart. In her own words she narrated the experience thus, “I was mesmerized by her beauty and elegance but most of all she looked happy and that is what I wanted to be; happy.”
When Elaine DePrince, an American woman who had lost three of her previously adopted sons to AIDS-related complications, came to adopt a child from Sierra Leone, she was told not to take “number 27,” in other words, Mabinty. But Elaine, determined to fulfill the final wish of one of her late children who wrote before dying, “Please adopt a child from West Africa,” chose her anyway. A year later Elaine will tell her new daughter, commenting on her vitiligo, that it “looked like a sprinkling of pixie dust or glitter.”
Once in America, Mabinty became Michaela. She arrived with trauma, and hunger, but also imagination, and a clear mental image of who she wanted to become. Her adoptive family stepped in and gave her love, structure, and a chance to dream out loud.
Ballet lessons followed. Training intensified. Michaela’s body, which was shaped by survival, had to relearn what it meant to move freely, to trust rhythm, to perform.
She was often the only Black girl in the studio. The only one with vitiligo. And still, she showed up. When she was told she didn’t fit the look, she countered with form and fire. The dream she had at three wild and improbable started becoming real.
She studied at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theatre. She danced with the Dutch National Ballet. Became the youngest dancer in history to dance with the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She published a memoir. She performed for audiences around the world. Among many recognitions were the honor and scholarships; from the Youth America Grand Prix Scholarship, to the Carnegie Corporation Honoree and being an Ambassador for War Child Netherlands. Michaela was a tapestry of limitless possibilities.
But life offstage remained complex. Michaela carried the grief of her early years; the loss of her biological parents and challenges of belonging in two worlds at once.
Her story was never about dance alone. It was also about holding onto possibility in places that tried to erase it. It was for every child told they were either too strange, scarred or complicated to matter, whispering to women who had survived violence, to that youth who had grown up in the shadow of war, and to those with no blueprint for joy reminding them that they could still build something beautiful.
On March 1, 2024, Michaela DePrince passed away at 29. The cause was not publicly shared, and the world has continued to respect the silence. What matters more is the legacy she left behind a life stretched between continents yet stitched together by resilience and love. “Despite being told the ‘world wasn’t ready for Black ballerinas’ or that ‘Black ballerinas weren’t worth investing in,’ she remained determined, focused, and began making big strides,” Misty Copeland, a trailblazing African-American ballerina said, in honour of Michaela.
She showed us what it meant to defy categories, bloom in the aftermath, and carry light even with a body marked by difference. Michaela was many things a dancer, a daughter, a survivor but most of all, she is proof. That the human spirit, when met with care, can rise.
