Holly Cruikshank

Holly Cruikshank
Born	June 18, 1973 Fountain Hills, Arizona

Holly Cruikshank (born June 18, 1973) is an American dancer. She is known for her role as Brenda in the Billy Joel/Twyla Tharp musical Movin' Out, and has also danced lead roles in two other Tony-award winning Broadway musicals: Fosse and Contact. She has appeared as one of the house dancers on the NBC variety-competition show, The Singing Bee.

Cruikshank was born in Fountain Hills, Arizona. She envisioned a career as a dancer from an early age, when she idolized the dancing of screen legend Cyd Charisse. She started ballet at the age of 3. By her teen years, she was rehearsing four hours a day and dancing with Phoenix-based "Ballet Arizona". Finally, after a year at the North Carolina School for the Performing Arts in Winston-Salem, she began professional auditions in earnest. Her attempts at a professional ballet career were unsuccessful, culminating in an audition for her "dream company", the Hubbard Street Dance Troupe in Chicago, where founder Lou Conte told her she was too tall to succeed as a professional ballerina (she is over 6 feet).

A dance teacher suggested she consider a career on Broadway instead. Pursuing the suggestion, she obtained her first role, a showgirl in Tommy Tune's The Will Rogers Follies at the age of 18. She was continuously employed as a Broadway dancer for the next 15 years until leaving to pursue a television career.

Following her role in The Will Rogers Follies, Cruikshank had a series of increasingly visible successes, landing roles in Hello, Dolly, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and finally a small featured roll in Fosse.

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