Graham Lustig

Since his appointment as Artistic Director in 2010, Graham Lustig has revitalized Oakland Ballet Company and helped the organization reclaim its position as a leading San Francisco Bay Area arts institution. Awarded the Alameda County Leadership Award in 2024, Lustig has brought the company a reputation for presenting community-based programming that makes the art of dance relevant, accessible, and engaging to the diverse community Oakland Ballet serves.

For the past fifteen years, Mr. Lustig has presented his critically-acclaimed production of The Nutcracker at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre, as well as an annual spring season rooted in more contemporary works. Lustig has also added Luna Mexicana, a dance and music celebration of Dia de los Muertos, Dancing Moons Festival, the first Asian American Pacific Islander ballet showcase in the nation, for which he received an Isadora Duncan Award in 2022, and created the LGBTQIA+ program titled Rainbow Dances.

Under Lustig’s watch, Oakland Ballet has grown its Discover Dance educational program to provide arts programming for nearly a dozen East Bay school districts. Discover Dance programs such as in-school assemblies, in-school dance residencies, and student performances provide arts education for more than 15,000 local school children each year. Trained at the Royal Ballet School in London, Mr. Lustig danced with the Dutch National Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet before embarking on a freelance choreographic career that has included operas, ballets and musicals. He serves as a founding member of the Artists Committee of Americans for the Arts and has served numerous times on the Dance and Policy Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts.