Sara de Luis is a Seattle-based dancer, choreographer, and educator widely regarded as one of the foremost authorities on Spanish dance in the Pacific Northwest. Born in New Orleans to parents of French and Spanish extraction and raised in San Francisco, de Luis has spent much of her career immersed in Spain’s rich dance traditions, developing a command of their depth and diversity that few practitioners outside the Iberian Peninsula can match.
De Luis is a dedicated champion of the full spectrum of Spanish dance — not simply flamenco, but the broader vocabulary of the form. Her expertise spans regionales (regional folk dances), escuela bolera (18th-century court dances), and the classical Spanish dance tradition inspired by composers such as de Falla, Granados, Turina, Albéniz, and Sarasate.
Her choreographic relationship with Seattle Opera spans decades. De Luis served as choreographer for Seattle Opera’s productions of La Traviata (1980, 2009) and Carmen (1982, 1987, 2003), and later brought her signature clásico español style to the company’s production of Massenet’s Don Quixote. She is recognized as one of the leading experts in Classical Spanish Dance.
Since 1986, de Luis has been on faculty at Pacific Northwest Ballet School, conducting Spanish dance workshops each year. Her work at PNB also extends to the repertory stage — her piece Cadiz premiered as a PNB School Performance in June 2005. Through decades of teaching and performance, de Luis has made the preservation and transmission of Spanish dance tradition to younger generations a defining mission of her career.