Alina Cojocaru has been made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire

Alina Cojocaru has been made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire

Alina Cojocaru was part of the approved group awarded in Honorary British awards for foreign nationals 2023 by His Majesty King Charles III.

Cojocaru (1981) left for London at the age of 18 after her success at the Prix de Lausanne and after a one-year contract with the National Ballet of Ukraine to join the corps de ballet of The Royal Ballet. At 19, she was already a principal dancer, a position she held until 2013. She subsequently held the position of lead principal with the English National Ballet, which she left in early 2021. Since then she has been a freelance prima ballerina, most often guesting with the Hamburg Ballet and collaborating with its artistic director and choreographer John Neumeier, who has previously created full-length ballets Liliom and The Glass Menagerie for her.

She has won many prestigious awards, including twice being the first female dancer to win the Benois de la Danse awards (2004, 2012). In the spring of 2022, just a few weeks after the war broke out in Ukraine, she co-organized the charity gala Dance for Ukraine with dancer Ivan Putrov to support the conflict-stricken country where she had studied at the ballet academy as a child. She is also a guest of United Ukrainian Ballet, a company made up of dancers who fled Ukraine, with whom she performed in Alexei Ratmansky's ballet Giselle.

Source: www.gov.uk