Dark Room Ballet began as Krishna’s specialized introductory dance curriculum for blind and visually impaired dancers. The Dark Room Ballet method is based on both Royal Academy of Dance ballet training and Butoh and classical Japanese dance training. Now, Krishna continues to offer an open all-levels ballet course on Monday nights, and so much more. 2026 features a full calendar of visual and performing arts workshops and courses taught by blind artists for blind students
The first Dark Room Ballet introductory course is a toolbox course that teaches specific skills, including finding balance without sight, maintaining orientation with auditory and foot sensitivity, and self-correction with internal alignment. Dark Room Ballet students can expect to learn transferable dance vocabulary and technique, as well as performance skills and musicality.
What is Dark Room Ballet?
Dark Room Ballet is an independent, grant-funded, tuition-free, pre-professional fine arts educational program for blind and visually impaired adults, taught by expert blind and visually impaired teaching artists. All courses are virtual, taught at the collegiate level, and are designed for the educational needs of blind and visually impaired people, both educators and learners. The Dark Room Ballet curriculum currently includes courses in ballet at the introductory, open, and professional levels, Simonson jazz, choreography, improvisational dance, movement somatics, dancer’s anatomy, vocal training, visual arts, and dramatic arts, as well as special professional development curriculum for audio describers of dance and blind audio description consultants. You can think of Dark Room Ballet as a tuition-free, independent fine arts college designed for and by blind and visually impaired people.
Why do people study with Dark Room Ballet?
Dark Room Ballet is an international hub for blind and visually impaired artists. Unlike most fine arts classes offered for blind and visually impaired adults, the courses offered through Dark Room Ballet are not recreational courses. All courses offered through Dark Room Ballet are taught at the collegiate, pre-professional, and professional level for people who want to study the arts in a serious way. Many people who study with Dark Room Ballet are either professional artists or pre-professional artists, as well as very serious amateurs. Studying with Dark Room Ballet is a great way to network for professional and career opportunities, and to create a circle of like-minded, anti-ableist, fun artsy blind friends. Dark Room Ballet continues the generations-long tradition of blind artist mentorship for the digital age.
How was Dark Room Ballet founded?
Dark Room Ballet’s first teaching artist, Krishna Washburn, conceived of the idea for Dark Room Ballet and its curriculum while she was studying for her Masters’ of Education at Hunter College back in 2009. Krishna started teaching limited series of introductory level ballet classes in New York City starting in 2013 under the Dark Room Ballet name. In early 2020, she started to teach another limited run of ten Dark Room Ballet classes at Movement Research in Manhattan, but after three classes, the city shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. She was working with specific funding, and knew that it was possible for her to teach the remaining seven classes using a virtual classroom on Zoom to the students she’d just met, so she installed a little dance floor in her kitchen, bought a microphone, and started teaching. News started to travel very quickly about these classes, and people from all over the United States and the all over the world started to join the class. By the time her funding ran out, Krishna knew that she never wanted to stop teaching her community, and continued to offer classes for free for nearly a year with support from Dark Room Ballet’s first and best administrator, Alejandra Ospina, Dark Room Ballet’s program coordinator, who built the screen-reader accessible Dark Room Ballet website, started Dark Room Ballet’s social media presence, and managed the multitude of technical necessities required to run a high quality educational program for an ever-growing community.
In 2021, Movement Research started to host Dark Room Ballet, and the classic schedule of Monday night Open Level Class and cycles of Dark Room Ballet Intro on Saturdays was born. In late 2021, The Dark Room Presents No Diagram Anatomy, a dancer’s anatomy course that de-centers sight, joined the curriculum, and professional development courses for audio describers of dance and self-describing dancers started up in 2022.
In Krishna’s original concept of Dark Room Ballet, she knew that she never wanted to be the only educator, and that she wanted to be a part of a full faculty of blind and visually impaired teaching artists with a commitment to anti-ableism. In 2025, The Dark Room Ballet Collegium introduced six new teaching artists with different specialties to the Dark Room Ballet community, and in 2026, Dark Room Ballet officially moved to a rotating faculty model in which some teaching artists offer limited run courses, some teaching artists offer special workshops, and some teaching artists offer ongoing open level classes. The administrative team, as well as the faculty, has grown and will continue to grow. Dark Room Ballet is, and will always be, where blind and visually impaired artists can learn the things they want to learn with support from educators that share their disability, tuition-free.