Misty Copeland

In 1997, Copeland won the Los Angeles Music Center Spotlight Award as the best dancer in Southern California. After two summer workshops with the ABT, she became a member of the Studio Company in 2000, a member of the corps de ballet in 2001, and a soloist in 2007. Stylistically, she is considered a classical ballet dancer. As a soloist since the autumn of 2007, she has been described as having matured into a more contemporary and sophisticated dancer.
Early life
Copeland was born in Kansas City, Missouri and raised in the San Pedro community of Los Angeles, California. She is of African American, German American and Italian American descent. Copeland is the youngest of Sylvia DelaCerna's four children from her second marriage. Her siblings from that marriage are Erica Stephanie Copeland, Douglas Copeland Jr., and Christopher Ryan Copeland. She also has two younger half-siblings, Lindsey Monique Brown (a former track star at Chico State University) and Cameron Koa DelaCerna, one each from her mother's third and fourth marriage. Copeland did not see her father, Doug Copeland, between the ages of two and twenty-two. Sylvia DelaCerna, a former Kansas City Chiefs cheerleader, had studied dance. She was a trained nurse, but worked mostly in sales. DelaCerna was biracial (Italian and African-American) by birth and adopted by African-American parents. Between the ages of three and seven Copeland lived in Bellflower, California with her mother and her mother's third husband Harold Brown, a Santa Fe Railroad sales executive. The family moved to San Pedro where Sylvia eventually married her fourth husband, radiologist Robert DelaCerna, and where Misty attended Point Fermin Elementary School.