Who

A former ballet dancer herself, Moore is the executive director of the American Ballet Theatre.

Backstory

Moore grew up in Davis, Calif. and started taking ballet classes at the age of 11. By 13 she was practicing six days a week, and after graduating high school in 1984, she moved to New York to join ABT's corps de ballet. Her career was cut short when she sustained an injury that left her in a cast for an entire season, and at 24 she enrolled at Brown, graduating in 1992 with a degree in ethics and political philosophy. After earning a master's in arts administration from Columbia, she transitioned to the business side of the performing arts world, and spent the 1990s working with a variety of groups including the National Cultural Alliance, Ballet Theatre of Boston, and Project STEP (a classical music school for minority students in Boston). Before arriving at the ABT in 2004, she served as the director of the Boston Ballet's Center for Dance Education and taught classes at Emerson College and Boston University.

Of note

When Moore arrived at the ABT in February 2004, she took over an ailing company that had gone through five different executive directors in four years. She's managed to turn things around, tripling the endowment and dramatically increasing sales. With a $40 million budget and a company of 90 dancers, Moore's also been credited with thinking beyond the stage—in 2006, for example, she negotiated a deal which teamed the ABT with Payless to launch a line of ballet shoes.

While Moore keeps the ABT's business running smoothly, it's Kevin McKenzie who oversees the creative direction of the company. Moore works closely with the executive committee and members of the board of trustees, which includes Muffie Potter Aston, Blaine Trump, Susan Fales-Hill, David Koch, Quest publisher Chris Meigher, Devon Briger (the wife of Peter Briger), Sullivan & Cromwell partner Robert Giuffra, and of course the ABT's honorary chair, Caroline Kennedy, who has continued the Kennedy family tradition of supporting the ABT.

Personal

In 1994, Moore married Robert Ryan, a systems engineer she met at Brown. They live in a 1920s colonial house in Bronxville. They don't have any children: "Who has time for kids?" she once asked a reporter.