Ms. Dot Walker joined St. Mark’s Dance Studio in 1983 teaching children and adults’ ballet and jazz. In addition, she served as a company member with St. Mark’s Dance Company under Mary Craighill performing throughout the DC metropolitan area. She began her dance training with Katherine H. Duffey, Incarnation Dance Group and later danced with Workshops for Careers in the Arts, the predecessor and driving force of today’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts created by Peggy Cooper Cafritz and Mike Malone. She received a scholarship to study at the prestigious Dance Theater of Harlem with Arthur Mitchell and Karl Shook prior to attending Point Park University. There she continued her studies in dance under Nicolas Petrov and Leonide Massine and performed with the Pittsburgh Ballet Company. She later returned to Washington, DC and joined the Jones-Haywood School of Ballet and the Capitol Ballet Company established by Doris Jones and Claire Haywood. While teaching at St. Mark’s Dance Studio, she traveled in 1995 as the company’s ballet mistress in Prague, Czech Republic.

Dot serves as a member of Beyond the Ballet Barre Live. This group, formerly the Ballet Collective formed a collaboration with Canada’s National Ballet School (NBS) and part of an ongoing partnership in October 2022, NBS sent six students on an exchange to Washington, DC to attend classes, visit studios and tour. In November 2022, she escorted eight exchange students from four different DC Dance Studios (The Washington Ballet, Jones-Haywood School of Ballet, Dance Institute of Washington, and St. Mark’s Dance Studio) to attend Canada’s National Ballet School in Toronto, for classes and touring. Dot has served as a guest teacher several times at Canada’s NBS.

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