Katherine Elena Hanson

Wearing Many Hats: From Ballet to Law, Grant Writing, and Authorship

When people ask me what I do, the answer is fairly straightforward: “Oh, I’m a professional ballet dancer.” Most people are surprised and delighted by this; most people haven’t encountered a professional ballet dancer before. But that barely scratches the surface of who I am or what I’ve accomplished thus far in my life.

I usually start off by explaining that ballet is my day job. In other words, I’m in the ballet studio five days a week from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. I’m warming up my body, taking ballet class to work on my technique and get ready for rehearsals, and rehearsing for whatever the next production is. This season, we’ll be starting off with Oliver Halkowich’s Dracula, which is one of my all-time favorite ballets to perform in, before switching gears for The Nutcracker, a mixed-repertoire bill sometime in the spring, and, ending out the season, Swan Lake.

Sometimes, strangers I’m talking to will ask about the money. That’s usually where I explain that it’s true: ballet isn’t lucrative. Most of us professional dancers have multiple jobs. I teach ballet one or two evenings a week and have been doing so for about fifteen years now. I also work in development. The development company I work for is hired by nonprofits to do their fundraising, so, through this company, I write grants for those same nonprofit clients.

How did I get here from ballet? I have a master’s degree in Arts Administration from the University of New Orleans—recently renamed LSU-New Orleans—that I received two years ago. It was through my master’s program that I landed my grant-writing job.

Occasionally, someone will have heard about my other writing before they know me. When my writing comes up, I explain that I’ve published several fictional short stories within the last year and just finished writing the first draft of my first novel. But before I took up fiction writing during the summer of 2025, I took up my first nonfiction book, which, I am happy to say, is getting published at the beginning of February 2027. The book, titled Preeminent: How Professional Ballet Companies Became the Greats in Their Field, actually arose from the content of my master’s thesis. But you can see how the ballet experience also ties into my nonfiction book.

What I haven’t told you yet is how ballet is actually my second full career. I was an environmental lawyer before I was any of the things I’m doing now. I always danced seriously when I was younger and was a company member in a semi-professional company, where we worked in the evenings after the end of the school and workday. I went to college and got two full bachelor’s degrees in three and a half years to prepare myself for environmental law, all while dancing twenty-five hours every week. And then, when I attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., for my J.D., I was still teaching ballet and freelancing for various ballet gigs.

Essentially, I’ve always worn many hats.

They teach you, when you’re studying nonprofit management, that those who lead nonprofits wear multiple hats at any given time. It’s true. I’ve watched so many of the directors, ballet masters, and other nonprofit employees around me switch gears constantly. I’m just fortunate that I get to switch hats that are so different that I get to give my brain and body their rightful breaks in their own time.

I cannot advocate enough for having a physical pursuit to do outside of a mental pursuit, or for having a mental pursuit that is completely separate from a physical pursuit. My body is stronger for dancing, and my mind is sharper for continually expanding my field of knowledge and getting to use that knowledge, whether for grant writing or for other mental work.

Don’t get me wrong. You have to be extremely smart to pursue ballet at a professional level. You have to pick up whole ballets’ worth of choreography in short amounts of time, sometimes as short as a week, and be able to perform every single step to nuanced perfection. You have to be so in tune with your body as to be able to make smart decisions about what your body needs every single day.

However, ballet uses a completely different side of my brain than grant writing does or than the practice of law did. In that way, I get a mental break from my “intellectual” work when I’m dancing, and I get a break from the dancing and choreographic side of my brain, as well as a break for my body, whenever I’m engaged in my more intellectual desk work.

I think this sort of balance has been one of the major keys to my ability to cram so much into such a short amount of time. To say that I’m 32 and am a professional ballet dancer, grant writer, published author, and former lawyer with four degrees is rather hard to believe. I can only believe it because I’ve been there and seen myself do it.

And the balance of all those hats is, I think, what made it possible.