Kyle Marshall turns to cooking for stress relief. “I also eat a lot, so I like to make big meals,” adds the dancemaker and artistic director of Kyle Marshall Choreography. “This curry dish is something I started making as a dancer coming home and wanting something that felt really filling.”

“I have a sweet tooth, for sure,” says Dawn Atkins. The recently promoted Miami City Ballet principal searched for a snack to bring to work each day, but struggled to find something that gave her the sugar fix she was craving—and was healthy.

As a New York City–based flamenco dancer, Laura Peralta makes regular pilgrimages to Spain to study the form for a few months at a time. After several hours of intense flamenco classes, her favorite thing to eat is salmorejo, a chilled tomato soup usually served with Iberian ham (jamón ibérico), crumbled hardboiled eggs, and short breadsticks called picos.

When Caitlin Trainor’s daughter Evangelina was a toddler, Trainor wanted to give her a treat that was nourishing and contained minimal refined sugars. After some experimentation in the kitchen, Trainor developed her cast-iron banana bread.

Growing up in Salvador, Brazil, Luisa Cardoso ate rice and beans every day. When she moved to the U.S. in 2014—first to Miami, to attend Miami City Ballet School’s pre-professional program, and then to Memphis to join Collage Dance Collective, where she’s now in her seventh season—Cardoso found the availability of prepared food very tempting.

In elementary school, Sarah Stafford came home each afternoon to find her grandmother preparing her a snack to enjoy before ballet class—often, it was arroz con leche. Now in her first season with New York Theatre Ballet, the comforting rice pudding is in Stafford’s own cooking rotation and remains an all-time favorite.

In 2020, Anne Souder made a New Year’s resolution to create less food waste—and it stuck. The Martha Graham Dance Company soloist continues to work toward this goal by finding creative ways to repurpose leftover ingredients.

“My partner and I love, love, love sweet potato pie,” says TyNia René Brandon, who uses she/they pronouns. Although the soul food classic is closely associated with holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, for Brandon, who plays Dolores and is a member of the ensemble in Broadway’s Some Like It Hot, it’s timeless.