Meet OUR founder
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Hello, my name is Jacquelyn Allsopp and I’m the founder and CEO of Ankh Academy of the Arts. I’m a native of Brooklyn NY, and started dancing at 4 years old in a Dimensions in Dance in Brooklyn, NY. Being of Puerto Rican, Italian, and Irish descent we were always dancing at home. Salsa dancing in the kitchen and tap, jazz, and ballet in the studio. These forms of movement were my first exposure to dance and little did I know these genres set the foundation for my versatility as a professional dancer later on.
At 8 years old, I was accepted to an elite ballet school in NYC, known today as Ballet Tech/Feld Ballets NY. This school is the only tuition free, high caliber ballet program in all the USA, that offers high level ballet training to underprivileged students of NYC. With my mother being single and raising two young girls by herself, this program was God sent for us and it changed my dance trajectory for the rest of my life.
The training I received at this school allowed to become a soloist with numerous Ballet, Modern, Opera, and Broadway companies over the last 25 years; but it was my early exposure to multiple genres of movement that shaped my formative years of dance, and contributed to my versatility and confidence in my own cultural intelligence, that then allowed me jump to from one genre of movement to another at such high levels.​
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Believing that my cultural differences were an asset, allowed me an incredibly diverse professional dance career. More recently, I’ve pivoted to the other side of the table to stage International and National Broadway tours of West Side Story all around the world. I also guest artist in many schools in the NY/NJ area, and outreach programs in St.Maarten in the Caribbean, all the while finishing my Masters of Arts in Dance Education from Hunter College, with a K-12 teaching certification from NY state.
My passion is to cultivate well-rounded, culturally confident dancers, who recognize that their uniqueness and cultural intelligence is important to the world. We encourage them to trust themselves, and that bringing yourself fully to all spaces is an asset. Through dance, we will instill confidence, teach cognitive skills, and high level techniques, all through positivity, love, and encouragement. I’m looking forward to sharing my professional knowledge, while empowering them to trust in their cultural intelligence, so they can realize their fullest potential as the future leaders of our world.