David McAllister AC
A graduate of The Australian Ballet School, Perth-born David McAllister began his training with Evelyn Hodgkinson and joined The Australian Ballet in 1983. He quickly moved through the ranks, culminating in his appointment to Principal Artist in January 1989. His principal roles have included those in Onegin, Romeo and Juliet, La Fille mal gardée, The Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, The Sentimental Bloke, Coppélia, Manon, La Sylphide, Sinfonietta and Stepping Stones.
In 1985 he won a Bronze Medal at the Fifth International Ballet Competition in Moscow and the same year won the Oceanic Equity Arts Award for Young Achievers in Perth. As a result of the Moscow Competition, he was invited to return to the USSR as a guest artist and made numerous appearances with the Bolshoi Ballet, the Kirov Ballet, the Georgian State Ballet and other companies in Don Quixote, Giselle and in gala performances.
In 1989 he was guest artist with The National Ballet of Canada performing in John Cranko's Romeo and Juliet and in Etudes and The Four Temperaments. He has also been a guest artist with Birmingham Royal Ballet and Singapore Dance Theatre. In London in 1992, he took part in the Royal Gala performance of Coppélia in the presence of the Princess of Wales. David danced leading roles across the classical ballet cannon and appeared in a number of television broadcasts including Sir Fredrick Ashton's La Fille Mal Gardee, Ronald Hynd's The Merry Widow, Maina Gielgud's Giselle and Graeme Murphy'sNutcracker: The Story of Clara.
In November 2000, he completed a Graduate Diploma in Arts and Entertainment Management at Deakin University. David McAllister danced for the final time in Giselle on 24 March 2001 at the Sydney Opera House and became Artistic Director of The Australian Ballet in July 2001.
Over the next two decades, on his way to becoming The Australian Ballet's longest-serving artistic director, David invigorated the company's repertoire with a series of new commissions from the world's foremost choreographers, including Alexei Ratmansky and Wayne McGregor. He appointed two new resident choreographers, Tim Harbour and Alice Topp, and, secured major works such as John Neumeier's Nijinsky, Christopher Wheeldon's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland© and Yuri Possokhov's Anna Karenina.
He has led the company on 11 international tours, created the Bodytorque program to identify and support young, upcoming choreographic talent, oversaw the development of the Education program in schools, and the creation of the Storytime Ballet, designed especially for pre-school-aged children. Through his support of the creation of a Parental Leave Policy, he enabled a generation of female dancers to extend their careers like never before. In 2015, as a director/choreographer, David gifted the company with a lavish and widely acclaimed new production of The Sleeping Beauty.
He is a regular presenter to students of the University of Melbourne Arts Management course and in 2019 delivered the Sir Redmond Barry Lecture at State Library Victoria. He is a Vice President of the Royal Academy of Dance, and Trustee of the Frederick Ashton Foundation in London. David was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2004 Australia Day Honours List and then Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) in June 2022 for service to the performing arts, particularly as Artistic Director of the Australian Ballet and as a Principal Dancer. In 2019 David received the Creative Partnerships Australia Award for Arts Leadership and in 2020 was awarded the J.C. Williamson award for Arts Leadership from Live Performance Australia. He was also awarded the Queen Elizabeth Coronation Award from the Royal Academy of Dance in April 2021.
In 2019, David announced that the 2020 season would be his last with the company. Since leaving The Australian Ballet David has completed a new production of Swan Lake for the Finnish National Ballet that premiered in 2022. He has taken the role of Interim Artistic Director of the Royal New Zealand Ballet in 2023.