Audrey Tovar-Dunster, a 17-year-old dancer with American Ballet Theatre Studio Company, will attend Colorado's Vail Dance Festival July 31–August 10 as its 2026 scholar in residence. The coveted residency gives young dancers mentorship and daily company class alongside the festival's star performers.

Her résumé already reads like that of a dancer twice her age. Tovar-Dunster began training at the Philadelphia Ballet School at 6, joined its trainee program at 12, and moved up to the second company by 14. A year later she relocated to New York to refine her technique at ABT's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School. She joined the Studio Company after one season.

She was born into the profession. Her mother, Samantha Dunster, is the current artistic director of American Repertory Ballet and the Princeton Ballet School; her father, Eddy Tovar, a former principal dancer, leads the Metropolitan Ballet Theatre and Academy in Maryland. Aunts, uncles, and her grandmother also work in ballet as dancers and administrators.

"I grew up surrounded by the arts, and watching my dad dance when I was little made me want to be like him," Tovar-Dunster says. "But like a lot of dancers, I also fell in love with dancing in the living room and the way it feels to express myself in that way."

As Vail's scholar in residence, she follows Kayla Mak, Daniel Guzmán, and Elijah Geolina — each of whom has since joined ABT's corps de ballet, a trajectory that makes the residency a reliable marker of talent on the rise.

"The dancers I know who have gone to Vail speak so highly of it, and I look up to them so much," she says. "The environment seems so open to growth and improvement. You have these principal dancers there at the height of their career, but they're also eager to grow, and learn, and evolve."

She names the festival's roster of dancers, choreographers, and coaches as the residency's chief draw. "I'm excited to watch and learn," she says.

The altitude will not be entirely unfamiliar. Tovar-Dunster toured with the ABT Studio Company to high-elevation venues this past year. "It's a whole separate challenge, finding ways to rest and regroup onstage so you aren't breathing heavily," she says.

Colorado is not her only stop this summer. She will also return to Italy and Ireland for Alessio Carbone's Balletto di Venezia, which she took part in last summer.

Her repertory experience already includes Christopher Wheeldon's "An American in Paris," performed with the Studio Company. Her dream roles run to the dramatic core of the canon: Juliet, Manon, and Odette/Odile. "I watched Chloe Misseldine in Swan Lake recently, and it was literally like I was seeing it for the first time," she says.

Offstage she journals and bakes, and she hopes to visit her roommate's home in South Africa. But the through-line of her ambitions is simpler: keeping the living-room dancer alive. "The audience feels what you're feeling," she says. "As much as I want to evolve my technique, I want to remember why I do what I do and not lose the joy."

Given that every previous Vail scholar has landed in ABT's corps, her Vail debut this summer may well be the next step on that same path.