the
COLLECTION
THROUGHLINE
Over the last decade, I photographed my career as a professional ballerina. This collection wasn’t planned, but rather became an accumulation of moments I couldn’t imagine forgetting. From backstage to class, rehearsals, dressing rooms, and sets, these photographs offer not an outside perspective, but the behind-the-scenes reality of a dancer at work. Working with a slow shutter, I tried to capture the energy of dance as it moved all around me.
2026 marks ten years since the first photo of this collection. Throughline has turned into a love letter to not just ballet, but the people I have met because of it.
— Emily DeVito Goodman
THROUGHLINE is presented in two parallel studies: black & white and color. The photographs originate from the same moments, but each treatment offers a different way of returning to them.
In black and white, color falls away, leaving movement, light, gesture, and emotion at the forefront. Stripped of our initial reaction to color, the images become more visceral—closer to how I imagine my memories of dancing will feel over time: less defined by their details, and more by the sensations they leave behind.
In color, the same moments remain rooted in the world in which they occurred. Vibrant stage light, costumes, and color capture the grandeur and almost heightened reality of being inside a theater—the pure awe of experiencing live performance as a whole. It embraces the artifice of ballet and theater: the elements deliberately constructed to create something that, once experienced, is genuinely felt.
Together, the two studies offer different experiences of the same fleeting moments. Black and white strips away the "stage makeup," revealing something more intimate beneath the performance, while color embraces the theater's full artifice—the very theatrics that, in many ways, allow us to experience the true magic of the moment.
BLACK + WHITE
COLOR
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
Live performance disappears the moment it happens. That impermanence has my shaped perspective as a dancer and photographer. I have always been inspired by the fleeting—not only the performance itself, but the lifestyle that unfolds around it. Shot over the course of ten years as a professional ballerina, this collection is a homage to movement; attempting to stretch memories into relived sensory experiences. I was never worried about forgetting the big moments of my career, but the quiet, in between moments that carried me day in and day out, those are what I hope to never forget.
As the curtain rose in 2016, I took the first photograph of this collection. The image was blurred beyond what I had intended, yet it contained something that I found to value more than clarity: the atmosphere of being backstage. I soon realized it felt less like a photograph, but a kinesthetic memory I could press play on.
Ballet is all about the lines and steps you strive to execute; on the surface the emphasis is always the end goal of perfection but long before that lay the rhythm within our bodies, the anticipation we feel the wings, the exhaustion, the quiet, and the fleeting exhilaration of a life lived in motion.
Martha Graham once said “A dancer dies twice — once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful." These ghostly images create a time capsule between those two deaths, preserving not the performance itself, but what it felt like to dance.
