Ludmilla Chiriaeff

Ludmilla Chiriaeff

Ms. Chiriaeff would have been 100 years old in 2024. She founded Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in 1957 and remained the company’s artistic director until 1974, allowing her to weave the company into the history and DNA of the Quartier. Les Grands Ballets have performed at Place des Arts every year since 1963.

As artistic director, she commissioned and produced some of the most significant productions ever presented in the Quartier, including The Nutcracker, Carmina Burana and Fernand Nault’s Tommy.

Ms. Chiriaeff also founded the city’s professional dance academy, the École supérieure de danse du Québec, and remained its principal until 1991. She trained multiple generations of dancers who excelled as performers, choreographers and teachers, not only with Les Grands Ballets but with many of the contemporary dance companies and organizations that perform in the Quartier, many of them based there.

Although she produced more than 300 works during her career in Montreal, for Les Ballets Chiriaeff and Les GBC, Ms. Chiriaeff’s greatest legacy is not choreographic. Rather, through her role as an artistic director, producer and teacher she changed the history of dance in the Quartier, Montreal and Quebec. Thanks to her visionary leadership, Montreal boasts a ballet company and a professional ballet academy of the highest calibre. Thanks to Ms. Chiriaeff, Montreal is universally acclaimed as one of the world’s great dance capitals. Without her, the Quartier would not be the epicentre of dance performance in Montreal.

In 1980, she was awarded the Prix Denise Pelletier for the performing arts by the Quebec government. She has been a Companion of the Order of Canada since 1984. She received the title of Grande Montréalaise in the cultural category in 1978 and was named Commander of the Order of Montreal in 2016.