Sahel Flora Pascual

Ballet Austin (2022-present)

Growing up in the Philippines, Sahel started her dance training with Maritoni Tordesillas and later
studied under Lisa Macuja-Elizalde and Osias Barroso at Ballet Manila. She continued her training at the School of American Ballet, performing in the school and with the New York City Ballet in their 2022 Spring Gala and Stravinsky II Festival, and originating featured roles with the New York Choreographic Institute.

Sahel later joined Ballet Austin and performed as a guest artist with Kim Robards Modern Dance
Company. She is currently performing and touring with the London City Ballet. Sahel’s choreographic journey began at the School of American Ballet, where she created Gemini 4 (2021) and Ondine (2022) for the Student Choreographic Workshops. Expanding her artistic exploration beyond the stage, she later conceptualized and directed a screen dance for Boston Ballet’s Summer Program – a project conducted entirely over Zoom.

She had the honor of participating in MoBBallet’s Pathways to Performance Choreographic Program under the mentorship of Theresa Ruth Howard, Christian von Howard, Donald Byrd, William Forsythe, and Robert Binet. Informed by her African American, Jamaican, and Filipino heritage, she approaches choreography as a relational and reflective practice – one that allows dancers to encounter themselves more fully through movement. Her choreography is grounded in both the rigor of formal construction and the emotional depth of process. She values aesthetic clarity and compositional precision, recognizing the visual and structural power of dance, while remaining deeply attuned to the interior landscapes of the artists she works with. For her, choreography is not simply about shaping bodies in space, but about shaping experience – a way of building spaces in which dancers can move through identity, memory, and transformation with integrity. Rather than impose a fixed narrative, she build frameworks that support emergence, trusting that meaning arises through the interplay of form and feeling, the crafted and the unexpected. While spectacle has its place, it is the quieter, often unseen shifts – the moments when dancers feel truly witnessed, when movement becomes a language for what resists articulation – that give her work its most enduring resonance. In these moments, her choreographic voice continues to unfold: as an offering, an inquiry, and a site of shared becoming.

In parallel with her professional dance career, Sahel is pursuing a degree in Financial Economics and Psychology at Columbia University in New York City. She is a recipient of the Finley Fellowship for Venetian Studies at Casa Muraro in Venice, Italy, and has pursued advanced studies in Western art and music at Reid Hall through the Columbia Global Center in Paris, France. Her contributions also include serving as a Dance Educator and Student Enrichment and Development Consultant in Ballet Austin’s Academy. A committed advocate for representation, equity, and access in the arts, Sahel is dedicated to building inclusive, generative spaces – onstage and in process – where artists of all backgrounds are seen, heard, and supported in telling their own stories.

Source: Sahel Flor Pascual

Sahel is an alumna of the inaugural MoBBallet Symposium, held in 2022 and hosted by Philadelphia Ballet. In 2024, she returned as a choreographer in our Pathways to Performance program, working under the mentorship of Donald Byrd, William Forsythe, and Robert Binet.⁠ Her growth and artistry stood out, and she was selected as a 2025 Pathways Fellow and recipient of a choreographic commission at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School—becoming the third Fellow to receive this honor.
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