VANESSA TIEGS
Artist | Ballet Coach | Dance Photographer | Architectural Model Builder & Designer | Inventor
To See The Sea
as A Tree of Life
Classical Ballerina & Pianist
Vanessa began her artistic career at 15, performing on The Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. & The Auditorium in Chicago with The Zurich Ballet under the artistic direction of Rudolf Nureyev. She trained on full merit scholarship at The American Ballet Theatre School in NYC starting at age 10.
During her Smith College years, she studied architecture, historic preservation, urban planning, music theory & piano performance.
International Photographer
Also at age 10, her father showed her how to develop negatives in his dark room. In 2010, she used the Digital SLR Canon EOS 7D to photograph one subject for over 365 consecutive days to create her published photography book.
Getty Images, Avanti Press, and another small press in the U.K. license her photographs internationally.
Vivi's Ballerina Dream
Her photo series, “Vivi's Ballerina Dream" (2010) became the campaign posters for Dancers Love Dogs in 2012, a not-for-profit organization in South Africa.
While visiting Ms. Kirkland in her dressing room after her performance, the famous ballerina gifted her pointe shoes to Vanessa. Kirkland's magical gift keeps on giving: Dancers Love Dogs has assisted over 26,000 homeless dogs in Cape Town, Durban & Johannesburg since 2012.
The series features the historical pointe shoes that Gelsey Kirkland wore in her 1976 American Ballet Theatre performance of "La Sylphide" at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, New York.
Dance Photographer
Vanessa also photographed the dancers she coached. One student joined the Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet in New York and another joined the Kirov Ballet Academy in D.C.
Using A.I. in 2024, Vanessa produced Venus Geist Portraits deriving from selfies. She has practiced calligraphy, painting & model building (at Robert A.M. Stern Architects & Skidmore Owings & Merrill in NYC), which evolved into Miniarcs: designing, building & photographing miniature modern interiors. From 2005-2010, she was Senior Executive Assistant at Booz Allen Hamilton (San Francisco). She also assisted teams in international companies, such as Sony Europe in Amsterdam and Deutsche Bank in NYC.
Vanessa's favorite pastime is Karmic Astrology. Vanessa traveled to archaeological sites in Old Europe including Prague, Malta, Sardinia & the Greek Islands Santorini & Crete, which inspired her studies in Hellenistic Astrology. Then, after returning to the States in 2000, she learned Evolutionary Astrology. By 2012, she met her mentor, Zsuzsanna Griga, a Transcendental Karmic Astrologer in Budapest, Hungary.
Vanessa also invented a navigating tool for astrologers that tells cycle logical time.
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