Kitty Lunn

Kitty Lunn died at her home in Manhattan, New York City, on 18 August 2026. She was 76. Dance Teacher and other outlets reported the death in the following days. Wikipedia and some later summaries list cardiovascular disease as the cause; that detail should be read as reported rather than as a family medical statement.

Tributes described her as a trailblazing artist, educator and activist whose company and teaching changed expectations of who belongs on a ballet stage. Infinity Dance Theater and the dancers she trained remain the clearest measure of that work.

Kitty Lunn was born Kitty Morrison in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 5 August 1950, to Hugh and Beatrice (nee McClung) Morrison. As an eight-year-old she saw Moira Shearer in the film The Red Shoes and decided to become a dancer. She left New Orleans to study at the Washington School of Ballet and, still in her teens, danced principal roles with the National Ballet.

When she was a sixteen-year-old ballet student in Washington, D.C., she asked Agnes de Mille whether a medical intervention might help her reach six feet en pointe. De Mille's reply, that she would have to learn to dance in the body she had, stayed with her for life and later guided her work after she became disabled. In 1967 she moved to New York to pursue a professional career.

Lunn's early New York years were those of a working dancer and aspiring Broadway performer. In 1987, during rehearsals for her Broadway debut, she slipped on ice, fell down stairs and broke her back. The resulting spinal cord injury left her paraplegic. After five spinal surgeries and three years of recovery she returned to ballet class in a wheelchair, often without encouragement, and began building a technique suited to her body.

In 1995 she founded Infinity Dance Theater, a mixed-ability ensemble of dancers with and without disabilities, including performers in wheelchairs. The company's style rested on classical ballet, with jazz and modern elements adapted to each dancer's abilities. Lunn often shifted expressivity from the legs to the arms and torso, and she used a specialised lightweight wheelchair designed by her husband, Andrew Macmillan, that allowed speed and precision. Infinity Dance Theater performed across the United States and internationally, including at the Kennedy Center and at the 1996 Cultural Paralympiad in Atlanta, and presented works by choreographers such as Peter Pucci, Heidi Latsky, Marc Brew and Lunn herself.

She also acted: a recurring role as Sally Horton on As the World Turns, Joseph Chaikin's Chaikin Project at the Public Theater, Agnes of God at the Alliance Theater, and The Waiting at the Kennedy Center. As a teacher she offered rigorous classical classes for people with disabilities and trained teachers so that advanced disabled dancers could join mainstream studios. She served on performers-with-disabilities committees for Actors' Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA, negotiating for ADA compliance and broader casting, and received Equity's Rosetta LeNoire Award in 2004.

Lunn was married to the actor and news anchor Andrew Macmillan, who designed her performance wheelchair and who died in 2016. She had a stepson. She lived and worked for many years in New York City, where Infinity Dance Theater was based, and remained closely identified with the city's dance and disability-arts communities.

She spoke publicly about disability, casting and technique throughout her later career, returning often to the idea that a wheelchair could be as personal and enabling as a pair of ballet shoes when it was engineered for the dancer who used it.

Lunn's legacy is the practical expansion of classical dance. Through Infinity Dance Theater she showed that wheelchair users and other disabled performers could meet professional standards when technique, choreography and equipment were adapted with seriousness. Her teaching rejected the idea that disabled dancers should be confined to therapy classes, and her union work pressed theatres and casting directors to treat disability as part of nontraditional casting rather than an exception.

The advice Agnes de Mille once gave her, to dance in the body she had, became a public creed. Students, company members and audiences who saw that creed made visible on stage continue to carry her influence forward.