Misty Copeland

speaker

575 appearances 3 recordings 2 series first heard Jun 2025 last heard 8 Nov

Misty Copeland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 2.

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The Daily · 'The Interview': Misty Copeland Changed Ballet. Now She's Ready to Move On. · 7 Jun 2025 podcast

April 12th of 2022. And Jackson was born April 2nd. So it's 70 degrees and beautiful outside. The windows are open and there's a breeze moving through the house. My baby is asleep beside me, his chest rising and falling so gently. It's like watching a little miracle. Linda, who's my mother-in-law. Linda's in the kitchen cooking and the entire place smells like love. Olu, who's my husband.

Olu's in the shower and for a moment everything feels still and full. I can't believe he's ours. He's so small and so vulnerable and yet so powerful in how he's changed me. The love I feel for him is overwhelming. It's deep, pure, and bigger than anything I've ever known. I've spent so much of my life in motion, chasing perfection, discipline, and control. But this, this is different.

It's surrender. It's presence. It's joy.

Yeah. I mean, I think that it being a mother and having my son has like allowed me to let go even more. And maybe that's why it's been easy for me to transition, you know, and easy to, you know, that this is a new part of my identity as well. And it doesn't have to all be ballerina anymore. And as a performer, so much focus is on you.

And to be able to now not do that and to be giving it to my son and for my family in a different way, it's so fulfilling and it just feels like the right time to do it.

Dance is such an integral part of every culture. And for some reason, it's not valued in the same way that music is or fashion is or food is.

Hi.

I'm good. How are you? I'm good.

There were other stickers in my locker, too, that were probably worse than that. I would say that I've been at that same locker since I was 17 years old. So it's been a long time. And it definitely, those were during very rebellious times where it was like, I mean, I don't know if you'd say rebellious, but feeling like I was working uphill. And so there was a lot of that in the beginning.

I feel, especially internally, definitely not something I was like screaming. You know, I've always been very introverted. So it was like I'm expressing myself and the inside of my locker.

Oh, God, this is so inappropriate. My boss is like a diaper full of shit and always on my ass. Oh, my God. I mean, I was young.

I think that... Whenever you're approaching a situation where things have been done a certain way for forever and change needs to happen, that there's going to be really difficult and uncomfortable times. And I think that that was 15 years of my career.

where I felt like I needed to fully be who I am and not bend and twist to fit what I thought they wanted or what I'm seeing in front of me, which I will never be able to be that because I'm not a white woman and I don't fit into this idealized mold of what a ballerina is supposed to be.

And so my relationship with the company, with my artistic director, with the dancers in the company completely has evolved through that time. But it took a lot of patience.

Yeah, you know, I go with my instinct a lot. And during the pandemic, George Floyd, it felt like the time to speak up and, you know, shine a light on the injustice that so many have felt for so long and give a really clear, like, you know, perspective and example. And I think that we're in a place now where it's so muddy and

And I think that, I mean, I don't want to say that, yes, like, you know, we're trying to stay away from backlash, but it's like, You lose focus on what the work really is when there's all this other outside noise around it, rather than, like I said, you know, you're putting your head down and you're doing work.

Like I'm in these communities and I'm having these conversations and I'm, you know, creating programs that will go beyond this, you know, this administration. And that to me is what's important is that we keep consistent and doing the work and

in a way that, you know, is not going to, I guess, ruffle any feathers and have focus on us where there's funding taken away, where, you know, it's really complicated.

And I think that this is bigger than... the language that we're using. This is not something that has just come about post-George Floyd or because of this administration. This is work that I've been doing since I started ballet. It's work that's undeniable when you are a minority. That, you know, it just is what it is and you're doing it. So again, this isn't something new.

This isn't some trend that we're on. It's real important work that's affecting real lives every day.

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