Julianna Rubio Slager is a Chicana choreographer, educator, and artistic director whose work expands what ballet can hold: fuller stories, deeper feeling, and a wider range of human experience.

As Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Ballet 5:8, the nationally recognized Chicago-based company she launched with Amy Sanderson in 2012, Julianna has helped shape a distinct place for emotionally resonant, intellectually rigorous, female-led ballet in the national landscape. Her work brings a distinctly Chicana voice to classical ballet, opening the form to greater cultural dialogue, human complexity, and theatrical immediacy.

Raised in Albion, Michigan, in a family with roots in Mexico and New Mexico, Julianna came to dance early and trained across a wide range of classical and contemporary traditions. Her foundational teacher, Lori Ladwig, helped nurture her early love of dance, and her later studies included mentorship connected to Ann Arbor Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, the Vaganova Academy, and the Balleteatro Nacional de Puerto Rico. She also trained and performed under Barbara Smith at Greater Lansing Ballet and under Kathy Thibodeaux and Sol Maisonet at Ballet Magnificat. That breadth of training shaped her deep respect for the discipline and architecture of ballet while opening her imagination to movement that feels immediate, embodied, and dramatically alive.

That intersection remains central to her voice as a choreographer. Julianna creates work that pairs classical rigor with emotional truth, musical clarity, and striking theatrical contrast. She draws deeply from her identity as a Chicana artist, crafting ballets that feel both intimate and expansive, grounded in beauty yet unafraid of weight, complexity, or contradiction. One of the signatures of her work lies in the way she juxtaposes the force of the corps de ballet with the singular voice of one dancer, allowing the collective and the individual to illuminate one another with unusual power.

Under her artistic leadership, Ballet 5:8 has premiered more than 65 original ballets and toured to 17 U.S. states. Her works, including La Llorona, Reckless, Día de los Vivos, The Lost Women of Juarez, Butterfly, The Space in Between, and BareFace, explore faith, cultural memory, justice, womanhood, and redemption through choreography that is technically rigorous and emotionally resonant. Whether drawing from myth, sacred texts, or lived experience, Julianna creates dances that invite audiences into a fuller encounter with beauty, grief, longing, and hope.

She has become especially known for narrative ballets that confront difficult subjects without losing lyricism or wonder. Her work engages themes such as femicide, mental health, human trafficking, and spiritual longing, not as abstraction, but as lived realities carried by the body. See Chicago Dance praised her for “transforming the oftentimes stiff perceptions of ballet into a malleable clay that we can all touch, be touched by, and play with.” That capacity to make ballet feel urgent, human, and porous to the world around it has become one of the hallmarks of her choreographic voice.

Julianna’s impact extends well beyond the stage. As an educator and mentor with more than two decades of teaching experience, she has taught dancers at more than 100 ballet schools across the country. As Artistic Director of the School of Ballet 5:8, she oversees programming for more than 400 students each year, guiding young artists toward both technical excellence and personal authenticity. Her teaching invites dancers to bring thoughtfulness, courage, and self-knowledge into the studio, and many of her students have gone on to study at leading institutions and dance professionally nationwide.

Her leadership and artistry have earned recognition across the field. In 2023, she was named a National Visiting Fellow at the School of American Ballet and was a finalist for the Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award. She has received multiple Illinois Arts Council grants and a DCASE Individual Artist Grant. Her work has been featured by NBC, PBS, Fox, Chicago Magazine, Newcity Stage, See Chicago Dance, and numerous podcasts and radio programs.

As one of the few Latina artistic directors of a professional ballet company in the United States, Julianna stands within a growing movement reimagining the future of ballet. She believes classical technique and cultural equity belong together, and her work continues to create space for voices, histories, and interior lives too often left at the margins of the form. She makes ballets that invite audiences not only to admire, but to feel, question, and remember.

Julianna lives in the Chicago area with her husband, Jeremy Slager, Ballet 5:8’s Executive Director, and their three children. Her faith shapes both her life and her work, and she approaches dance as both an artistic discipline and an offering.