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Karen Gibbons-Brown was born in Pittsburgh and trained in Columbia, South Carolina, and — on scholarship — at the American Ballet Theatre school and the David Howard School. She danced with Ballet Celeste, the Bristol Ballet and Theatre Ballet of San Francisco, where she recreated Anna Pavlova's signature California Poppy and Dragonfly roles, and in 1985 she founded the Kingsport Guild of Ballet in Tennessee. In August 1998 she became artistic and executive director of the Fort Wayne Ballet — the company's first woman director — and rebuilt the organization around its school, moving it into the Auer Center in 2011.
Fort Wayne Ballet, incorporated in 1956, is Indiana's oldest professional ballet company; its sixty-fifth season fell in 2021–22. Dean Speer's On Technique (2010) named her one of the world's eighteen most respected ballet pedagogues, and she is an ABT Certified Teacher.
Sources: Fort Wayne Ballet official biography and playbills; Whatzup (Fort Wayne); FortWayne.com.