Products are independently selected by our editors. We may earn an affiliate commission from links.
On @Ballerinafarm, the hugely popular Instagram account run by Hannah Neeleman—a farmer, social media influencer, former Juilliard ballerina, and mother of eight—there is a video in which she dances in a field, surrounded by cows. Her jeans are ripped at the knees, her feet are bare, and her long, glossy blonde hair is pulled away from her face, just as it would have been in her former life as a ballet dancer. It’s a rare video in which she’s completely alone (minus the cows), not cooking with and for her children, milking livestock with her husband, or competing in a beauty pageant, as she famously did 12 days after her eighth child was born. She’s smiling as she performs her series of petit allegros, her lines impeccable, her feet arched, her upper body light and expressive even as her legs and feet power her through the quick succession of jumps. She looks happy, peaceful, lit from within.
Of course, she’s not really alone. Her 9.4 million Instagram followers are watching, and she is performing a fairy tale for us—not about a princess transformed into a swan, or a nutcracker come to life, but concerning a talented ballerina who gave up her dream of dancing in New York City to move to Utah, start a farm with her husband, and raise their eight children.
Last month, The Times of London sent a reporter to the Neelemans’ farm to profile Hannah and learn more about how she created and manages the Ballerina Farm brand on the family’s 328-acre farm. The article quickly went viral, puncturing the fantasy that Ballerina Farm has spent years creating on Instagram and TikTok by examining the trajectory of Neeleman’s career. Reactions to the story, by Megan Agnew, focused on Daniel Neeleman and the way he contrived to sit next to her on a JetBlue flight for their first date (his father is the billionaire founder of the airline), the fact that he doesn’t want nannies in the house, and the whispered confession from Hannah that the one time Daniel wasn’t with her while she gave birth, she got an epidural and “It was kinda great.” Daniel also told Agnew that “Neeleman sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.” Hannah may make life after ballet look easy and fulfilling, but the truth is far more nuanced.
Social media users found it “beyond depressing” that Neeleman gave up her dreams in order to follow her husband’s. His name alone is on the Ballerina Farm LLC, though she is the face of the brand. It’s a dynamic as old as time: He controls the finances, but they use her image and domestic labor to earn money in the first place.
As a former dancer myself, Neeleman’s success on social media is unsurprising to me, merely following the script we all learned in the ballet studio. Her life is like one big ballet performance: She is a small, pretty, white, and likable star, descriptors that could just as easily apply to a famous trad wife as to a prima ballerina. Though she gave up the stage years ago, she remains a consummate performer.
Of course, it would be unfair to blame ballet solely for Neeleman’s beliefs around womanhood; her Mormon faith has certainly had a large part in shaping those. Still, as Turning Pointe writer Chloe Angyal told Momfluenced author Sara Petersen in Petersen’s newsletter, “it’s not Ballet Farm. It’s Ballerina Farm. We’re talking about the feminine person version of this dance form. We’re talking about the pinnacle of a very specific kind of womanhood, a very specific kind of femininity.”
The complicated lessons ballet taught me about my own femininity have taken me decades to unlearn, and some of the most insidious ones I still can’t fully shake. A childhood and adolescence devoted to ballet taught me how to perform in the theater, but also long before that, how to do exactly what it took to impress teachers and choreographers. Dancers are rarely asked what would feel good to them. Instead, they are taught to dance through pain, to perform roles with troubling messages, and that the gaze of an audience (historically male, but even now, certainly patriarchal) gives them worth. These are, of course, all things that could also be said about trad-wife influencers.
The parts of ballet that last—the scores, choreography, teaching styles, and artistic direction—have always been dominated by men. As a dancer, I had a perpetual awareness that I was replaceable, so when I was in pain, or didn’t love a piece of choreography, I knew to keep my mouth shut. I never wondered what I wanted, because I had been trained that what the choreographer or teacher wanted was what mattered. From a young age, I learned to make myself just as subservient as Hannah Neeleman appears to be.
Juilliard, Neeleman’s longtime dream that she had to abandon during her first pregnancy, accepts 12 women a year into their undergraduate dance program. Juilliard dancers can earn a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree at the end of four years of training. Their alumni go on to dance, choreograph, and direct at some of the best companies in the world, and several of America’s most pioneering choreographers are on their list of notable alumni. In short, Hannah Neeleman was at the beginning of what could well have been a long and fulfilling career in ballet when she married Daniel. “I was going to be a ballerina,” she told Agnew. “I was a good ballerina.” But she knew ballet and motherhood, especially the motherhood of traditional Mormonism, were incompatible. “I knew that when I started to have kids my life would start to look different,” she admitted.
In some ways, a ballet career’s demands are at odds with those of motherhood. Being pregnant and giving birth require time, which dancers racing their own clock toward a mid-30s retirement (if they’re lucky enough to avoid injury) simply don’t have. Hannah Neeleman may have pivoted her life’s dream, but other things remained exactly the same. As a young, aspiring ballerina, she learned ballet’s ugliest lesson: that it is easier to follow a man’s vision than to question it.