Mikael Pasini

Mikael Pasini began dancing at the age of four in Castelvetrano, a small town in Sicily. At eleven he auditioned for the Accademia Nazionale di Danza and was accepted. For the next four years he went to school in the morning, took a ninety minute train to the academy in the afternoon, ate and did his homework on the ride, danced, and took the train home. At fourteen he moved to Rome alone to continue at the academy’s main campus, and at nineteen he graduated with the highest marks. He also trained in dance at the Convitto Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele II.

During his freelance years in Rome, a video of one of his performances reached the award winning Artistic Director Igal Perry, who invited him to New York and offered him a full scholarship to the Certificate Program at Peridance Center in Manhattan. Mikael moved to New York City in 2017 and has been a member of Peridance Contemporary Dance Company ever since, performing as a soloist and lead dancer. His role with the company has grown to include assisting Igal Perry on tours, auditions, and masterclasses.

As a concert dancer and triple threat, Mikael has performed at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Igal Perry’s Nutcracker with Peridance Contemporary Dance Company, at Sony Music Hall in work by Miles Keeney, at the TDF Gala Broadway Awards, and at New York Fashion Week for the clothing brand Studio 189. Following one of the most competitive audition processes of his career, he was selected by award winning choreographer Kristian Cellini to perform alongside Carla Fracci, the critically acclaimed prima ballerina, at Teatro Luca Ronconi. He has danced works by Igal Perry, Robert Battle, Jessica Lang, Johannes Wieland, Mike Tyus, Larry Keigwin, and Julie Magneville.

His screen credits include Wonderama, the American talent show produced by David Michaels, Amici, the longest running talent show on Italian television, House Party, directed by Giuliano Peparini, and the film Un uomo e una voce, directed by Giuseppe Conti. In commercial dance he has performed with the Israeli singer Gad Elbaz on his L’Chaim World Tour at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn and with the Italian singer songwriter Laura Pausini. He appears in music videos for Mordechai Shapiro’s Ashira, with more than two million views, Simcha Leiner’s Shuvi, and Brandon Jerrod’s Overtime, which won Best Music Video at the Hudson International Film Festival in New York.

Mikael has been teaching at The NYPAA since 2022. He has also taught ballet and contemporary at Jete’ Dance Center, Dance Molinari, New Settlement, Westchester Square Academy High School, Beyond Dance Center for the Performing Arts in Brooklyn, and The New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts.

In the Dance Department at The Conservatory at NYPAA, Mikael teaches ballet and contemporary side by side, on the conviction that the discipline of the barre is what makes free movement possible rather than the opposite. His classes build technical proficiency, flexibility, coordination, musicality, and stage presence, and then push students past the point where they are counting and into performing. He came up through an academy that demanded everything, and he asks for real work, but his aim is not to produce copies of himself. It is to give each student the technique to execute anything and the confidence to find a voice inside it.