Maryhelen Mayfield

Mayfield grew up in Des Moines, Iowa.^[1] She began training in ballet when she was seven years old.^[1] She attended the Conservatory of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri–Kansas City before transferring to the National Ballet School of Washington.^[1] She left school to pursue a dance career in New York City after the National Ballet School fell under financial hardship.^[1] After an unsuccessful few years in New York, Mayfield returned to Des Moines and began working as a dance teacher and choreographer at a ballet school opened by one of her childhood ballet teachers.^[1] She taught at the school for two years before moving to Kansas City, Missouri where she earned a degree in ballet and joined the company at Kansas City Ballet as a member of the corps de ballet under the direction of Ron Sequoio.^[1][2][3] There, she trained under Russian ballet mistress Tatiana Dokoudovska.^[4] In 1980, she danced in James DeBolt's The House of the Rising Sun, Mystic Journey, choreographed by Ronald M. Sequoio.^[5] While dancing in the ballet, she also worked as an arts administrator for the city of Kansas City, Kansas, across the Missouri River.^[1]

In 1980 she moved from Kansas City to Greensboro, North Carolina to take up the role of artistic director and executive director of Greensboro Ballet, then a struggling ballet company known as Greensboro Civic Ballet Theatre, succeeding Elissa Minet Fuchs.^[1][6][7] Within her first month as a director, Mayfield choreographed a short ballet to premier as part of the ballet's inaugural season.^[1] With only $200 in funding in 1981, she staged the company's first The Nutcracker in a local church's recreation room, profiting $1,500.^[1] The following year, she moved the company's home performance space to the World War Memorial Stadium and, later, the Carolina Theatre of Greensboro.^[1]

Mayfield married John Dennis, a former ballet dancer with the Dallas Ballet, in 1993. They met when Dennis moved to Greensboro and began teaching at the ballet in 1986.^[8]

In 1986 Mayfield obtained an accreditation for Greensboro Ballet as a ballet school from the Southeast Regional Ballet Association. In 1995 she separated the ballet into two programs, a classical ballet school and a small professional company.^[1][9] In 1992 she was honored as an "outstanding North Carolina dance teacher" by the North Carolina School of the Arts.^[1] In February 1999 she debuted her original ballet, Doors, with Greensboro Ballet at the North Carolina School of the Arts.^[1] Maryfield also choreographed Mutcracker, a parody ballet based on The Nutckracker that incorporated dogs in the performance.^[10] Mayfield choreographed and staged over twenty-five original works for Greensboro Ballet.^[11]

In June 2002 Mayfield spoke out in opposition to the Greensboro Cultural Center requiring fees to non-profit arts organizations.^[12] In 2015 Mayfield graduated from the Guilford Nonprofit Consortium's Executive Director Academy.^[13] She was a recipient of the Betty Cone Medal of the Arts Award in 2007.^[14][15]

In November 2019 Mayfield and Dennis left Greensboro Ballet.^[8][16] Mayfield was succeeded by ballet mistress and company member Jessica Fry McAlister as artistic director and by Jennifer Savage Gentry as executive director.^[8] Company member Nina Bass Munda succeeded Dennis as school director.^[8] In January 2020 Mayfield and Dennis filed a lawsuit against Greensboro Ballet.^[17]