Jacob's Pillow Dance

Carreño was eight when he began studying with Alicia Alonso, Lazaro Carreño, and Loipa Araujo. He trained at the Provincial and National Ballet Schools in Cuba and immediately joined the National Ballet of Cuba where he soon became an established favorite among Cuban dance cognoscenti. Carreño won the prestigious Gold Medal in the New York International Ballet Competition (1987) and was later awarded the coveted Grand Prize at the USA International Ballet Competition in Jackson, Mississippi, (1990) from which he accepted an invitation from Ivan Nagy to join English National Ballet as Principal Dancer. In 1993, the Director of England's Royal Ballet, Sir Anthony Dowell, invited Carreño to become a principal dancer with The Royal Ballet. He delighted and astonished audiences with the depth of his interpretation and technical flair in virtuoso roles in Don Quixote, Ashton's The Dream and Sleeping Beauty. In 1995 Carreño was invited by American Ballet Theatre's Artistic Director Kevin McKenzie to join ABT as Principal Dancer. Carreño joined a year later, further expanding his repertory to include roles as diverse as Balanchine's Apollo, Danilo in The Merry Widow, Frank in Coppélia, Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake, Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, Prince Desire in Sleeping Beauty, Solor in La Bayadère, and Albrecht in Giselle, among others. Carreño has danced with most of the great ballerinas of recent years, including Alicia Alonso, Carla Fracci, Alessandra Ferri, Viviana Durante, Nina Ananiashvili, Susan Jaffe, Diana Vishneva, and Svetlana Zakharova. Twyla Tharp and Nacho Duato regard him as an outstanding interpreter of their choreographies. Guest appearances in Italy include Teatro Alla Scala, Opera Di Roma, Teatro San Carlos, and Teatro Romano. Carreño is an acclaimed guest artist around the world, dancing in galas and with companies such as Bolshoi Ballet, Kirov Ballet, Royal Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, Tokyo Ballet, Berlin Staatsoper Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, Teatro Colón (Argentina), Teatro Municipal de Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and Ballet de Monterrey (Mexico). Carreño was nominated for a dance 'Oscar' as one of the world's supreme male classical soloists of the new millennium (Monte Carlo 2000) and Dance Magazine awarded him Male Dancer of the Year in 2005.