About Us

Master Ballet Academy (MBA), the official school of Phoenix Ballet, is celebrating its 15th season and is under the artistic direction of Slawomir Wozniak.  Located in Scottsdale, Arizona, MBA has trained many professional and award-winning dancers including USA IBC Jackson award-winning dancers Giselle Bethea and Tia Wenkman and IBC Varna gold medalist William Jackson Beckham. MBA teaches Vaganova-based ballet technique with year-round programsincluding a 7-week Summer Intensive and mini “GPI” Intensives. 

MBA students have received coveted offers and scholarships to train all over the world including Vaganova Ballet Academy in Saint Petersburg, Princess Grace Dance Academy in Monaco, Royal Ballet School in London,Canada’s National Ballet School, San Francisco Ballet, Basel Dance Academy in Switzerland, Munich Ballet Academy in Germany, and John Cranko Schule in Stuttgart, Germany among many others.

Many graduating MBA students have gone on to professional dance careers all over the world including contracts with ABT, Tulsa Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, Colorado Ballet, Norwegian National Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, Orlando Ballet, Nashville Ballet, BalletArizona, Nederlands Dans Theater, and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal. MBA dancers have appeared on MBA’s YouTube series, “Born on Pointe”, Netflix’s “Driven to Dance”, “Dance Moms” and “So You Think You Can Dance.”

MBA trains students ages 3 to adult with a pre-professional division and has a professional performance company, Phoenix Ballet with multiple performance opportunities every season.

Performances include Slawomir Wozniak’s “The Nutcracker”, “Paquita” and “Snow White” among other ballets including new contemporary ballets by Mr. Wozniak and multiple world premieres commissioned for Phoenix Ballet by acclaimed choreographers.

Recent Awards: Outstanding School and Teacher Awards, YAGP (Youth America Grand Prix) 2012-2021ADC/IBC, Outstanding School and Teacher Awards, 2012-2019 World Ballet Competition, Outstanding School and Teacher award 2021.

Our Story

In 2007, my wife Irena, and our two sons Michael and Slawomir Jr moved from Poland to the United States and we started our ballet school - Master Ballet Academy. Miss Irena had just retired from dancing and I recently graduated from the University of Music in Warsaw. It was a natural transition from being a Principal Dancer of Poland, and already recognized choreographer to become a teacher, and to be able to transfer our experience, knowledge and passion onto younger generations of ballet dancers.

Of course, my entire dream will come true when we will be able to run our own company based on the dancers we trained, and have them perform around the World in full ballet repertoire, but it takes time, but we are striving to make it happen. And just as we started dancing as children, because we felt it was our desire, passion and destiny - we wanted to continue our "mission" as teachers to fulfill our love to ballet. Probably that's why our sons' without any input from us, became ballet dancers as natural order, as they saw how much we love what we do and decided to follow that path.

Ballet was all our life and it will be as long as we will be able to be involved. As we believe dance is the most wonderful form of art, we would like to make sure that people who don't know it, will fall in love with it by seeing our great quality performances. We also would like to provide dance education for our students at a level that they will be an important part of the dance world and they will be able to become a part its history by creating the future.