meet the V behind eleVe

a narrative-letter from our founder

To local visitors and faraway friends, welcome to our online space! I’m Victoria Sottosanti—founder & artistic director of eleVe | the studio where story lives. Currently, eleVe offers adult ballet, youth dance, and semi-private & private lessons, all through a narrative framework that believes the practice and performance of the arts is one of our greatest potentials for personal growth and communal healing. Although we are a for-profit local startup, our studio has philanthropic genes and dreams, offering full and partial need-based scholarships, with a specific focus of providing fine arts experiences & education to survivors of cancer, trauma, and addiction.

If you’re a creative person, someone drawn to story, or someone struggling with their physical or mental health who needs to simply start moving your body, eleVe exists for you.

If you’ve never danced but always wish you had, it’s never too late to start—we love working with dancers (both young and older) at their dance journey’s genesis.

If you’re someone who has survived life-threatening illness or other tragedies, our trauma-informed somatic classes are designed with you in mind.

If you’re someone who loves artistic culture & community, stay tuned as we’ll be sharing sign up info soon for our upcoming seasonal master craft classes & cohorts.

As a ballet instructor, I’m known for my precise & poetic communication, gritty passion, vivacious style of training, and rather healthy sense of humor! My goal is always to unlock my students’ innate artistry, inherent strength, and freedom through creative expression. My approach is to believe in students long before they do—pushing them with kindness towards the amazing potential I can see in their unique characters and stories.

The level of fortitude I bring to my teaching and students is personal. Over 36 years of life, I have survived childhood adverse effects, trauma, a flawed court system, addiction, and—most recently—breast cancer. As a memoirist, I have reflected deeply on tragedy and what it means to grieve well—what it can look like to heal. As someone who has spent years studying narrative art, I am admittedly biased about the unmatched, transformative power of Story, whether through dance or other means as a way to retell and revise our own lives. But it’s also because I know on an intimate level that no story is beyond saving; every pain can be repurposed.

My background in ballet began at age three in Massachusetts under Ms. Kotelli (Boston Ballet Company). Coupled with competitive gymnastics, my childhood days were a blur of sweaty laundry, classical beauty, long nights at the gym, and too many blue frost Gatorades. When my family relocated to New Hampshire at age twelve, I left the studio behind for athletics, eventually playing high-level softball and being named a NH All-State player as a senior—Go Eagles! This ten year gap of time away from ballet allows me to empathize with many of my students who also haven’t danced “a straight path” to ballet. I take time to know my students in order to encourage them to do what they love doing, no matter how hard things can be physically or mentally. I can also understand the desire & drive to pursue athletic competition, as I did the same and still made it back to dancing later in life when the time was right. It’s my desire for my students and clients to feel valued and safe enough that they’re able to relate to me beyond just a dance/art instructor, but a coach for life they can trust.

I finally returned to ballet as a college sophomore, where I quickly found my way back to the barre and joined the UNH Dance Company. There, I trained for two years in classical ballet under the director at the time, Larry Robertson (Soloist, Boston Ballet), who cast me in his debut Argentine Tango Ballet. After graduating with a degree in English with a concentration in Writing & Film Studies, I rediscovered Northeastern Ballet Theatre and the legendary Edra Toth pictured on the right (principal dancer, Boston Ballet). As a survivor of the Hungarian Revolution who fled a war-torn country at age four, Ms. Edra’s teaching style was life-or-death. Her two-hour classes were a beautiful bootcamp where she preached that art is not a luxury, but a necessity for survival. The studio was her sanctuary, and as a company dancer performing en pointe in my twenties under her wing, it became one of mine, too.

As a graduate student at UNH (MFA in Creative Nonfiction), I joined NBT dance company and staff, where I had the privilege of performing in Edra’s productions ofThe Nutcracker (Waltz of the Flowers; Russian), Beauty & the Beast (Gaston’s Admirer), Paquita (corps de ballet), Coppelia (corps), among other ballets and showcases. With NBT, I also had the amazing opportunity of beginning my dance teaching career, gaining nearly a decade of experience instructing beginner children through advanced teens & adults, as well as single-handedly directing and running the Prince & Princess Camps for pre-k and kindergarten dancers.

My dancing life left the seacoast and entered the Upper Valley in 2018, when my husband and I moved to the area. Since then, I’ve had experience teaching junior high and high school English at a private school, attending writing residencies to invest in my literary career, and composing different youth dance classes through local rec centers. As an adult ballet dancer, I also had the pleasure of training under some local-legend-ballet-masters who have deeply shaped my dancing, my teaching, and eleVe’s philosophy.

The first of whom was the lovely Jackie Stanton (previous owner+director of White River Ballet Academy; current owner of Junction Dance Boutique). Jackie brought a rich mix of always fresh, creative choreography alongside a solid technical foundation shaped by her years working with and choreographing for professional ballet companies. Jackie also shaped me as a local business owner & director I could look up to and learn from; her passionate care and belief in each of her students has stuck with me. Her gift of interior design & bringing otherwise dead studios to life, impacted my dancing and teaching, and inspired a vision for seeing “the dance studio” not just as a space, but as a rich haven of creativity.

Through Jackie, I met the beautiful Ruth Mayer, also known as one of the UV’s dance community’s “best-kept secrets,” whose thorough, personalized instruction inspires, enlightens, and shapes every dancer who walks through her door. Ruth is a genius artist; her choreography artfully methodical, her insights brilliant. Ruth is perhaps the most generous teacher I’ve had the privilege of training under. Her 2-hour classical ballet classes are so rich with lessons for both life & dance. I can hardly scribble the notes down in between barre combinations fast enough as she organically shares troves of hard-won wisdom from an impressive career as an American Ballet Theatre soloist.

♡ Plug ♡ If you’re someone who wants to pursue a dancing career in classical ballet, I highly recommend both Jackie & Ruth as the top, local masters of the artform.

Every creation, no matter how complex, has a humble beginning. Despite eleVe only becoming official in January of 2026, all of these past experiences were seeds planted, waiting to come to fruition. As we’re still in the beginning launch phase, we’re so thankful for your support, whether through follows, business, or funding our survivor scholarships. We hope eleVe soon evolves into something sustainable and profitable, that we might continue to uplift our community’s quality of life through the elevation fine arts and dance bring!

Thank you for joining eleVe here at its foundation, and thank you for inspiring a new story we get to tell together through our dancing, moving, and making.

To close, let’s raise up our mugs & pointed feet for a toast… here’s to the painful glories of technical rigor, disciplined desire, creative healing, and the forever-study of the divine forms of making we call fine art. And remember, no matter what or where your life has been, it’s never too late to lift yourself back up again.

With love for your story, we hope to see you soon in the studio where story lives.

eleVe away & tendu soon,

— V