Toni Bentley danced with George Balanchine's New York City Ballet for ten years. She is the author of five New York Times Notable Books which include WINTER SEASON: A DANCERS JOURNAL, HOLDING ON TO THE AIR (the autobiography of Suzanne Farrell co-authored with Farrell), COSTUMES BY KARINSKA, SISTERS OF SALOME, and THE SURRENDER: AN EROTIC MEMOIR. Her essay, "The Bad Lion" (originally published in The New York Review of Books) was selected by Christopher Hitchens for BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2010. She writes for the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Playboy, the Daily Beast, Vogue, Vanity Fair and other publications. She has given talks at Harvard, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rutgers, Middlebury College and the THiNK Conference 2013 in Goa, India. THE SURRENDER has been adapted into a one-woman play that premiered in 2013 in a production by the Spanish National Theater in Madrid,and has been performed all over the world, including off-Broadway at the Clurman Theater in New York. Her new book, SERENADE: A BALANCHINE STORY, is published in April 2022. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. www.tonibentley.com @TheToniBentley @tonibentleyofficial
