Professional Dancer Resume Example & Writing Guide

What should your professional dancer resume include?

Professional dancers can be employed by theater companies, musical theater productions, and even music videos or commercials; your resume should show recruiters that you’re experienced with and comfortable working in these environments. Your resume should also demonstrate your ability to work with choreographers, set/costume designers, and directors to put on performances that entertain and inspire. 

Why use this professional dancer resume example?

The resume template below is a good fit for professional dancers and other performing arts experts for several reasons. First, it’s designed to be compact. By listing details such as contact info and key skills on a sidebar, this resume gives you extra page space to describe your employment history in great detail (specifically, by discussing your day-to-day responsibilities in a single paragraph and your special accomplishments in bullet-point). This lets you fit your whole resume onto a single, easily-read page.

Technically, you don’t need any college degrees to pursue a career in professional dancing (though BAs in fields like performing arts or dance are always a bonus). Most performing arts groups do want to hire dancers who’ve been training in the craft for years. For that reason, this resume’s education section template is designed to be both simple and flexible, letting you describe the degrees you received from universities and the certificates you received from private dance schools. 

A third strength of this resume is the sample text, which describes the general responsibilities of a professional dancer using sentences that can easily be tweaked to describe your own specific experiences. Said text also contains useful keywords such as “dynamic” and “repertoire” that will grab the attention of recruiters and applicant tracking systems. By studying the language in these examples, you can build a unique resume that highlights your fitness, flexibility, passion for learning new styles/routines, and enthusiasm for working with your fellow dancers.

Which key skills are relevant to a professional dancer resume?

Make sure your professional resume describes the styles of dance you specialize in, whether it’s traditional styles like ballet, ballroom dance styles like tango, or modern styles such as break-dancing. Recruiters for theaters, dance companies, and/or dance studios also love to see professional dancer resumes with the following skills:

• Modern Dance Techniques

• History of Dance

• Ballet

• Dance Instruction

• Dance Studio Operations

• Team-Building & Coordination

• Recordkeeping & Reporting

• Set Building & Maintenance

• Choreography

• Backstage Production

• Basic Music/Vocal Performance Proficiency