Daphne Lee Opens Up About Being a Black Ballerina With Natural Hair

Daphne Lee is a few minutes late to our call. She is finishing up rehearsals with the Memphis–based dance collective, Collage. When she rushes out of the studio to speak, she isn’t breathless — rather, she is calm, laser-focused, and chooses her words with a particular determination. It’s immediately clear how she won the national Miss Black USA title in August — there is an elegance to her energy that can be felt through the phone. Lee is a black ballerina who wears her natural hair with pride and is determined to shatter stereotypes about the black female body.

Raised in New Jersey to a Panamanian father and English mother, she identifies as a first generation Afro-Latina. She is certainly a trailblazer — Lee won this year’s Miss Black USA pageant wearing faux locs, inspiring many of her pageant mates to wear their hair in a similar style after the competition was over. She is one of three black dancers with her own skin-swatched pointe shoe (most black dancers have to use makeup to match their shoes to their skin tones). Lee is a black ballerina at a time when they still make headlines, as Eurocentric body standards and industry racism continue to pervade the stage today.

It was only 62 years ago when Raven Wilkinson became one of the first African-American ballerinas dancing for a ballet company — under the condition that she paint her face as a white woman. Before Misty Copeland became a celebrity, starring in brand campaigns and her own film, Lauren Anderson broke barriers as …

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