Marianela Nuñez

Marianela Nuñez is currently listed by The Royal Ballet as a Principal. Marianela Nuñez is one of the defining ballerinas of her generation and one of the longest-established stars of The Royal Ballet. Royal Ballet and Opera’s 2024 announcement of her OBE sets out the broad chronology clearly: born in Buenos Aires, she began training at six at the Teatro Colón Ballet School, joined the Teatro Colón company at fourteen, and toured internationally both with the company and as a guest artist with Maximiliano Guerra. She entered The Royal Ballet School in 1997, graduated into The Royal Ballet in 1998, was promoted to First Soloist in 2000 and Principal in 2002 at just twenty. That same official statement describes her as having made The Royal Ballet her dancing home for more than a quarter of a century, a phrase that captures both longevity and unusual institutional centrality.

Nuñez’s official honours and repertory explain why her standing has remained so high. The OBE announcement notes that she has danced classical, dramatic and contemporary repertory by Ashton, Balanchine, Cranko, MacMillan, McGregor and Wheeldon, while also maintaining a major international guest career with companies including Paris Opera Ballet, Vienna State Opera Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and La Scala. It records her Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance in 2013 and Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards for Best Female Dancer in 2005, 2012, 2018 and 2022. More recent criticism confirms that the force of her artistry has not dimmed with seniority: a 2025 Guardian review of Onegin praised the way her Tatiana charted the heroine’s emotional transformation, while a 2020 Guardian interview captured her own insistence that ballet is not elitist and that mature ballerinas often become more interesting because of the emotional depth age brings.

Those strands together make Nuñez’s biography more than a list of promotions or prize roles. She represents a model of the fully rounded modern principal: a technically sovereign classical dancer, a dramatic artist of depth, a generous ambassador for ballet and a performer whose authority has only increased over time. The trajectory from child student in Buenos Aires to teenage professional at Teatro Colón, then to a young immigrant in London and finally to an OBE-honoured Royal Ballet icon, is exceptional even within elite dance. What stands out in both official material and interview coverage is not only the scale of her achievement but the continuity of purpose behind it: she has repeatedly framed dance as the thing that makes her happy, the medium through which she accepts emotion, and the art form she feels responsible for communicating to wider audiences.