Maryhelen Mayfield

Mayfield grew up in Des Moines, Iowa.[1] She began training in ballet when she was seven years old.[1] She attended the Conservatory of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri–Kansas City before transferring to the National Ballet School of Washington.[1] She left school to pursue a dance career in New York City after the National Ballet School fell under financial hardship.[1] After an unsuccessful few years in New York, Mayfield returned to Des Moines and began working as a dance teacher and choreographer at a ballet school opened by one of her childhood ballet teachers.[1] She taught at the school for two years before moving to Kansas City, Missouri where she earned a degree in ballet and joined the company at Kansas City Ballet as a member of the corps de ballet.[1] While dancing in the ballet, she also worked as an arts administrator for the city of Kansas City, Kansas, across the Missouri River.[1]

In 1980 she moved from Kansas City to Greensboro, North Carolina to take up the role of artistic director and executive director of Greensboro Ballet, then a struggling ballet company known as Greensboro Civic Ballet Theatre.[1][2][3] Within her first month as a director, Mayfield choreographed a short ballet to premier as part of the ballet's inaugural season.[1] With only $200 in funding in 1981, she staged the company's first The Nutcracker in a local church's recreation room, profiting $1,500.[1] The following year, she moved the company's home performance space to the World War Memorial Stadium and, later, the Carolina Theatre of Greensboro.[1]

Mayfield married John Dennis, a former ballet dancer with the Dallas Ballet, in 1993. They met when Dennis moved to Greensboro and began teaching at the ballet in 1986.[4]

In 1986 Mayfield obtained an accreditation for Greensboro Ballet as a ballet school from the Southeast Regional Ballet Association. In 1995 she separated the ballet into two programs, a classical ballet school and a small professional company.[1][5] In 1992 she was honored as an "outstanding North Carolina dance teacher" by the North Carolina School of the Arts.[1] In February 1999 she debuted her original ballet, Doors, with Greensboro Ballet at the North Carolina School of the Arts.[1] Maryfield also choreographed Mutcracker, a parody ballet based on The Nutckracker that incorporated dogs in the performance.[6] Mayfield choreographed and staged over twenty-five original works for Greensboro Ballet.[7]

In June 2002 Mayfield spoke out in opposition to the Greensboro Cultural Center requiring fees to non-profit arts organizations.[8] In 2015 Mayfield graduated from the Guilford Nonprofit Consortium's Executive Director Academy.[9] She was a recipient of the Betty Cone Medal of the Arts Award in 2007.[10][11]

In November 2019 Mayfield and Dennis left Greensboro Ballet.[4][12] Mayfield was succeeded by ballet mistress and company member Jessica Fry McAlister as artistic director and by Jennifer Savage Gentry as executive director.[4] Company member Nina Bass Munda succeeded Dennis as school director.[4] In January 2020 Mayfield and Dennis filed a lawsuit against Greensboro Ballet.[13]