Season Overview 2025-2026
September 9th, 2026
The 2025-2026 Season Overview, the 75th publication in just over seven and a half years. This report examines choreographic works performed by the Largest 150 Ballet and Classically based companies ranked by their FY2023 expenditure. This is DDP’s fifth edition assessing the Largest 150 companies – a significant expansion from early versions, which examined only the Largest 50. In total, the report analyzes 1,748 works, an increase of 122 works from the 1,626 works examined in the Season Overview 2024-2025 Report, released in July 2026.
Report lead Andrea Valentini notes, “The Season Overview report is among the longest-running in DDP’s catalogue, offering opportunities for nuanced analysis of longitudinal trends across the sector. With each iteration, we are able to better understand the trajectory of inclusion in the industry. Our findings can then be used not only by company leadership but by journalists, donors, foundation representatives, and audiences to bolster advocacy efforts at all levels.”
Within the Largest 150 U.S. ballet and classically based companies, women choreographed 32.9% of all works in the 2025-2026 season, matching the percentage of the 2024-2025 season. Women choreographed 17.5% of works presented by the Largest 10, 20.1% of works presented by the Largest 25, 25.6% of works presented by the Largest 50, 38.7% of works presented by the Next 50, and 38.2% of works presented by the Additional 50. The data continues to show that smaller, less-resourced companies are programming a greater share of women-choreographed work than their larger counterparts.
Figure 1: All Works – Choreographer Gender
Among the Largest 150, women choreographed 27.6% of full-length works, an increase from 25.7% in 2024-2025. However, the portion of mixed-bill works choreographed by women decreased from 35.0% in 2024-2025 to 34.3% in 2025-2026. Works by women are still programmed in mixed-bill works more often than in full-length works, which carry greater prestige and require larger investments of company resources. Despite this, the gap in representation in full-length vs. mixed-bill programming seems to be shrinking, though partly driven by a marginal decrease in full-length programming overall.
There are however, two very promising trends emerging regarding world premieres: women choreographed 49.5% of world premieres in 2025-2026 (up from 48.1% in 2024-2025) — a larger share than the 41.5% choreographed by men (down from 47.2% in 2024-2025). The remainder reflects works that fall outside a single binary-gender category. Additionally, women’s share of full-length premieres has now risen every year since DDP began assessing the Largest 150 in 2021-2022, when it stood at 22.0%.
NOTE: Another positive change – of the 428 unique choreographers who presented world premieres in 2025-2026, 53.0% were women (compared to 48.5% in 2024-2025). Research lead Isaac A. Garcia noted, “This season’s data retires the pipeline excuse. A majority of the choreographers making new work were women, and women created nearly half of all world premieres. The talent creating the future of the art form is clearly there. What hasn’t changed is who gets programmed at scale.”
For the third consecutive year, DDP tracked the number of times each work was performed during the season. Across the Largest 150, works by women were performed an average of 3.5 times (±1.1 performances), compared to 4.7 times (±1.6 performances) for works by men. The most-programmed choreographer of the 2025-2026 season was George Balanchine (male), whose work was staged by 36 companies across 62 programs. When Balanchine’s works are excluded as an outlier, works by men were performed an average of 4.5 times (±1.5 performances) among the Largest 150, maintaining their sizable lead compared to works choreographed by women.
The most-programmed woman was Annabelle Lopez Ochoa in the 2025-2026 season (ranked #6 by number of companies programming her work, #9 by number of programs including her work), whose work was performed by 6 companies across 7 programs.
DDP’s President and Founder Elizabeth (Liza) Yntema comments: “This, our 75th publication, is one of our most comprehensive to date. It highlights not only the barriers women face, but also the breadth of talent that the most funded companies often ignore. The frequent refusal of larger companies to look past a handful of well known men, represents the impetus for Dance Data Project® to launch DDP Pro. This online interactive digital platform democratizes the hiring process, taking the ‘but there are no female choreographers available’ excuse and banishing it to the trash heap. Women are prolific and talented. They exist all over the country. Dance Data Project® is taking our research and transforming it into actionable infrastructure.”
