One day when her father came to pick her up at her piano lesson, he walked in on Gladisa Guadalupe joyfully dancing, while her frustrated teacher played the music she was supposed to have prepared for that class.
“We’ve been missing out on this one,” he said. “She’s not a pianist. She’s a dancer!”
Soon after, Gladisa started taking ballet lessons. “The moment I walked into the studio, I knew that was going to be me,” she says. “That was the end of it.”
Such definitive resolve has proven to be the foundation of her many strengths. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Gladisa started her training at the early age of 13 with Ballets de San Juan, becoming one the company’s youngest members.
A few years later, she joined the School of American Ballet, the official training academy of the New York City Ballet, where she studied under the celebrated George Balanchine, father of American ballet and of the modern ballet movement, among the many other famed instructors.
Nervous because she was a petite Puerto Rican child with dark hair, a little darker skin surrounded by tall, beautiful, blond-haired blue-eyed dancers, she pushed on as she always had. Then in the first week, her teacher, the venerable Madam Alexandra Danilova, called her in front of the class to perform the adagio. She did. She thought she was going to be let go, disgracing herself and her parents. Instead, she was given a full scholarship to the yearlong program.
“I was in tears,” she says. “I had the passion, but I guess they saw something, and that was the moment when my parents realized we were going to move from Puerto Rico to New York and figure this out!”
From there, she was given a contract with Ballet Nuevo Mundo de Caracas in Venezuela. She traveled all over the world and “danced everywhere,” she recalls. “I was accepted into NYU, and I was tired of living out of a suitcase and dancing around. I want to go back to the United States and go to NYU.”
That was the plan. Until she received a call from Dennis Nahat, who had just returned from Caracas, where he had seen Gladisa dance and wanted her to join his company, Cleveland Ballet. She agreed to take one of his classes, and he offered her a job immediately afterward. She was unsure what to decide, until her mother said, “You have to do it. You can only dance when you’re young.”
Gladisa went on to a highly successful career as a principal dancer for Cleveland Ballet and served in many roles in the organization before leaving the company when it moved from Cleveland to San Jose, California, in 2000.
Gladisa decided to open the Cleveland School of Dance, today known as the School of Cleveland Ballet, soon after in 2000. In 2014, she and her husband Michael Krasnyansky, Ph.D., president and CEO, co-founded the professional ballet company.
“We were training dancers at the school who went on to receive contracts from many other companies in the U.S.” she explains. She bought the name “Cleveland Ballet” and incorporated it as a 501(c)(3) separate from the school. They now have 32 dancers from nine different countries, who receive 40-week contracts instead of the typical 24-week contracts of most companies.
“No one was happy with the way the ballet had left Cleveland,” she concludes. “But we turned that around and showed the foundations and our supporters that we are fiscally responsible and artistically stable, and we have a phenomenal board. Like any great city, Cleveland deserves a great ballet company, and we are on our way.”
Gladisa has also been an Adjunct Instructor for the Cecchetti Council of America, American Ballet Theater, Ballet De San Juan, Ballet San Jose, Ohio Ballet, Rochester School of Ballet and The University of Akron. She has been recognized as a Distinguished Teacher in the Arts and for Promotion of Excellence in the Arts by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. In 2021, she received the YWCA’s Women of Achievement Award, and in 2022, she received the prestigious Governor’s Award for the Arts in Ohio from the Ohio Arts Council.
Gladisa has also served as a consultant for The Cleveland Orchestra, Playhouse
Square Center, American Ballet Theatre, Cincinnati Ballet, Ballet San Jose, The Royal Winnipeg Ballet, The University of Akron, Jack and Jill of America, Danskin, The Cleveland Metropolitan School District, and many other community organizations.