Shelby Tzung ‘24

Shelby Tzung is a senior at Harvard, concentrating in Social Studies with a language citation in Chinese. She is originally from Los Angeles, CA and has been dancing since the age of 3. At age 8, she began her pre-professional ballet training with the Westside School of Ballet, where she performed roles such as the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker and Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux. She also spent various summers training on merit scholarships at Pacific Northwest Ballet, Boston Ballet, and the School of American Ballet. In 2016, she performed a solo from La Fille Mal Gardee at Walt Disney Concert Hall as one of the winners of the LA Music Center's Spotlight competition. In 2017, she moved to New York City to train year-round at the School of American Ballet, where she performed lead roles in George Balanchine's Concerto Barocco, William Forsythe's New Sleep, and Alysa Pires' Standard Deviation. Upon graduating, she was one of 3 dancers in her class to receive the Mae L. Wein Award for Outstanding Promise, accompanied by a $10,000 scholarship. After graduating, she was offered a contract to dance in Toronto as an apprentice with the National Ballet of Canada. There, she performed in works including Giselle, Chaconne, and The Nutcracker. She also toured with the company to perform The Sleeping Beauty at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. Outside of ballet at Harvard, Shelby was also the Founder and Co-President of the Harvard Undergraduate Think Tank.