Dominic Walsh was born in Elgin, Illinois and started his training with Lisa Boehm, Frank Boehm, Warren Conover, and Larry Long in Chicago. He joined Houston Ballet in 1989, and was promoted to Principal Dancer by 1996. Walsh danced throughout Asia, Europe, and North America and performed all the major classics including Swan Lake, Giselle, Don Quixote, Romeo & Juliet, and Manon with international stars such as Nina Ananiashvili and Alessandra Ferri. Walsh danced Houston Ballet’s entire contemporary repertoire, and Ben Stevenson created numerous roles for him including Marc Antony in Cleopatra.
In 1998, Walsh created Flames of Eros on Houston Ballet. This work won the Choo-San Goh Award for Choreography. He created three more works for Houston Ballet. In 2002, while still a Principal Dancer and Choreographer with the Company, he founded Dominic Walsh Dance Theater. After the company’s debut in February 2003, Dance Magazine declared, “At last Houston has a contemporary dance company on par with its symphony, opera and ballet companies.” The company’s roster included works by Walsh, Mats Ek, Jiří Kylián, Mauro Bigonzetti, and Matthew Bourne.
In 2004, Walsh left to pursue Dominic Walsh Dance Theater full-time. He won a second Choo-San Goh Award in 2007 and received a 2008 Princess Grace Award, both for The Trilogy and Wolfgang Amadeaus Mozart. In 2012, he was inducted into the Fox Valley Hall of Fame.
Walsh continues to receive commissions to set and create works nationally and internationally. He served as the Resident Choreographer for Sarasota Ballet of Florida, creating/staging Wolfgang for Webb (2008), The Trilogy (2009), Time out of Line (2011), and Claire de Lune(2011). In addition to his travels throughout the U.S. and abroad, he is a guest teacher and coach for both companies and academies and stages the works of his longtime mentor, Ben Stevenson. The Carl Jung Center has shown interest in Walsh’s creative process and he has given lectures at Houston’s Jung Center. He has written for various publications on dance, and was a regular columnist for Origin Magazine. Walsh made his film debut as a co-director at the Brussels Short Film Festival in Spring 2015 with Malta Kano, TX. That same year, he became a proud father and closed DWDT after 12 seasons. Last month, Walsh made his debut as Costume Designer for Stevenson’s Cinderella with the National Ballet of China.
