Abbreviated from Wikipedia: Julie Kent (born Julie Cox, 1969) was a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre from 1993 to June 2015. In 2016, she was named the artistic director of The Washington Ballet. She was born Julie Cox in Bethesda, Maryland. Her father was a nuclear physicist and her mother was a ballet dancer. She took the stage name Julie Kent at the suggestion of Mikhail Baryshnikov.