This dancer is the first Black woman since 70s to be in the Kansas City Ballet. She started in SC.

“I thought it was normal,” she said.

After middle school, she applied to the newly formed Governor’s School, where she could focus on her craft. Before then, she was unsure if she could make it in the grueling dance profession.

In Greenville, her world “opened up.” She didn’t just learn technique. They challenged her and gave her the confidence that she could make it as a professional dancer. 

Stanislav Issaev, a Governor’s School teacher, told her she was unlimited, she remembers.

“He told me that I could be in a company, and all this was just very new to me,” she said.

During the summers, she traveled to prestigious programs at the Boston Ballet and the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She attended Indiana University before earning her first job with Ballet West in Salt Lake City, Utah. In 2011, she was named one of Dance Magazine’s top 25 dancers to watch.

In 2014, she joined the Kansas City Ballet — the first Black woman dancer since the 1970s.

When first joining the ballet world, she tried to “assimilate,” she said. She just wanted to show that she could dance like everyone else. For example, she would straighten her naturally curly hair.

“I don’t want (my hair) to be a problem,” she said. “And I don’t want to not get this part because my hair is not straight. These things that I was thinking about, nobody else in the company even had to ever think about.”

She began to feel more comfortable after 2020.

Following the COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd, people started to ask Huell more about her experience — questions she had never been asked before. The company allowed her to wear flesh-colored shoes and tights that matched her skin tone, rather than the traditional pink colors that match White skin.

And she finally wore her hair curly.

“I actually love it,” she said. “It’s crazy that that was such a big deal to me. And now it’s not. I can be myself.”