San Jose Ballet School

San Jose Ballet School was started by Wana Williams Kalimos, a member of the prestigious San Francisco Ballet. Wana Williams directed the school from 1949 until 1959. Francesca Romanoff and Dimitri Romanoff, both of the American Ballet Theatre, co-directed it until 1980. Janet Vertin has been the director since 1980. She is the third-generation dance teacher in her family. Her great-aunt, Marion Belle White, was trained in London's Imperial School and San Francisco's school owner. Her mother Helen Pabst Walsh, a graduate of the College of Notre Dame Belmont, taught dance to Janet. Janet Vertin graduated from Santa Clara University, where she studied business administration alongside dance. She learned modern dance from a professor she admired and art history and humanities courses. Janet Vertin was an apprentice to Wana, a dancer who was "classically perfect" in her opinion. After training with Guillermo del Oro in the San Francisco Ballet School, Janet danced in several educational films and performed with San Jose Light Opera; then went to Europe, where she was asked to join the Opera Ballet in Kaiserslautern. After that, she studied for four summers with Vera Volkova, at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada.