What happened to Michaela DePrince?

Michaela Mabinty DePrince was born in war-torn Sierra Leone on Jan. 6, 1995. From those humble beginnings, she became one of the most famous ballerinas in the world. She was sponsored by Nike, and appeared in the 2016 Beyoncé visual album Lemonade. She passed away suddenly on Sept. 10 in New York City, and no cause of death has been given. This is her story.

Michaela was originally born as Mabinty Bangura in the southeast of Sierra Leone. Her father owned a little piece of land with his brother, where he farmed rice and produced shea butter. He also worked in a nearby diamond mine.

When Mabinty was young, she focused on her education because she had a skin condition called vitiligo, which causes white patches on the skin. In Sierra Leone, vitiligo is considered bad luck, so her father told her to focus on her schooling because she was probably unmarriageable.

Around the same time, her father was killed by rebels at the mines, and she and her mother went to live with her uncle. He mistreated her terribly, and her mother died from malnutrition and starvation. After that, her uncle took her to an orphanage.

There was a hierarchy at the orphanage, and she was designated as “Number 27” and referred to as such. She was despised because of her skin, with people referring to her as “the devil’s child.” She was beaten, poorly fed, and even witnessed the murder of a teacher by rebel fighters. She tried to save the teacher, and was stabbed by a young rebel boy.

“I have actually a scar from it and it was a black out after that – I have no idea how I survived that, it was awful,” she said in a 2012 interview. Her introduction to balletic dance came courtesy of a gust of wind. A magazine with a ballerina on the cover blew into the orphanage. The dancer looked happy, the way Michaela Mabinty wanted to be happy. She kept the magazine and started twirling around and daydreaming.

That dreaming turned to horror when a militia group commandeered the orphanage. Mabinty fled with the other residents to Guinea. On her way, she was forced to walk by hundreds of dead and rotting corpses.

In what some might call fate, a retired teacher and her husband, Elaine and Charles DePrince, were looking to adopt a girl. The couple had previously adopted three boys with hemophilia, and unfortunately they passed away from complications from H.I.V.

The boys contracted the disease from using blood-clotting treatments. One of the boys, named Michael, put the idea in his parents’ heads of adopting a girl from a war-torn country. Elaine flew to Africa after she saw a picture of Michaela Mabinty smiling.

Once in the states, Michaela Mabinty learned English and was put in ballet classes, where her talent was immediately recognizable. By high school, she was good enough to attend a ballet boarding school. She missed home but was determined to continue in her growth as a dancer.

She was introduced to the larger world when she was featured in a documentary called First Position, which followed six young dancers as they prepared for a prestigious ballet competition. During the filming, she earned a scholarship to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at the American Ballet Theater in New York City. This was in 2011. By 2014, she was considered one of the best dancers in the world, and was asked to join the Dutch National Ballet troupe as a soloist. She flourished and regularly performed the solo ballet part to Swan Lake.

She tore her Achilles’ tendon in 2017 and, unable to dance, started to have PTSD from her childhood memories. She realized that all the fame and storytelling was making her relive those memories over and over again.

In an interview with Pointe magazine in 2021, she said, “If I hadn’t ruptured my Achilles, I don’t think I would have had the time and space to be able to know how important my mental health was.” She left her job as a soloist in the Dutch National Ballet, and returned to the States. She got a new position as a second soloist with the Boston Ballet, something that was considered strange and surprising at the time.

She had reportedly left the Boston Ballet earlier this year. Her adoptive father died in 2020 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, something that motivated her to return home. Her adoptive mother passed away just one day after Michaela Mabinty. She was struggling health-wise and didn’t learn of her adoptive daughter’s death before her own. Michaela Mabinty’s sister announced the news of her passing in an Instagram post on Michaela Mabinty’s page. She was only 29 years old.