She was the most beautiful dancer the kindergartner from Randallstown had ever seen: a petite African American woman, hair slicked back into a voluptuous bun, dancing a solo to a gospel number by Yolanda Adams.

Jessica Amber Pinkett, wearing a sparkly tutu and standing in the wings, was watching her teacher’s former student Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell, a Baltimore-born star at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, who had returned to share the stage with Pinkett and other young dancers.

“That was the beginning,” Pinkett said recently. “I’m looking at this beautiful Black woman. And I was like, ‘There’s a woman that looks like me that’s dancing up there. I can do that, too.’”

After Fisher-Harrell retired from the company, she became one of Pinkett’s professors at Towson University. In 2018, Pinkett became an Ailey dancer herself, completing the lodestar orbit that has launched many dancers from the region to the country’s most prestigious Black dance company.

“We are vast,” Pinkett said, smiling and spreading her arms to indicate the breadth of talent extending from Baltimore to the great stages beyond.

As has long been an Alvin Ailey tradition, the company opened its 2025 North American tour this week with a six-day run at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It closes Sunday. Six of the company’s 33 dancers hail from Maryland or the District of Columbia, and incoming Artistic Director Alicia Graf Mack, herself a former Ailey star, grew up in Howard County.

“There is something very vibrant about the DMV arts community,” Mack said, especially because there’s a legacy of top-notch local dance programs that “honor diversity.” These include conservatory-style studios, Baltimore School for the Arts, Duke Ellington School of the Arts and Towson’s dance program.

“There’s a really beautiful cycle of giving back to your community, and also recognizing what is necessary to get dancers to those places,” said Mack, who will become the fourth leader in Ailey’s 67-year history on July 1. “We have these excellent teachers who have come back to create the next generation.”

Fisher-Harrell followed that arc. She attended Baltimore School for the Arts in the 1980s (where her classmates included Tupac Shukar and Jada Pinkett Smith, Pinkett’s first cousin) before eventually landing a 13-year career with Alvin Ailey. She returned in 2005 to Baltimore, where she taught dance at her alma mater and Towson University until Hubbard Street Dance Chicago recruited her to become artistic director in 2021.

“If I hadn’t seen the people that I had seen, like Linda-Denise, I would not be in the position that I am right now,” Pinkett said.

Towson replaced Fisher-Harrell with Caroline Rocher Barnes, a Black ballerina who danced alongside Mack at Dance Theatre of Harlem, a groundbreaking ballet company.

Mack, who trained at the now-closed Ballet Royale in Howard County, was offered a full-time contract with Dance Theatre of Harlem after her junior year at Centennial High School. Knowing stage careers are short and predominantly white ballet companies would be unlikely to hire a tall Black dancer, she took it. When health issues and financial turmoil at the dance company forced her to take a break from dance, Mack earned a degree at Columbia University, then ended up at Ailey, where her nearly 6-foot frame was unmistakable onstage.

Each Kennedy Center performance closes with Ailey’s signature work, “Revelations,” which was first performed in 1960. Ten spirituals provide the soundtrack as 20 barefoot dancers move with a sense of grounded earnestness before evolving into the most physically fit worshipers in all of Christendom. Although there are always a few white, Asian and Latino dancers in the company, the collective sense from watching Ailey is that the best human movers in the world are onstage, and they happen to be Black.

Nearly every dancer in the company has a story like Pinkett’s — of seeing Ailey dancers onstage and dreaming of joining the company someday. Corrin Rachelle Mitchell remembers her mother “putting a bunch of rambunctious little girls in a Dodge Durango” and driving them from Randallstown to the Kennedy Center. A few years later, Mitchell watched in awe as future Ailey star and then-Baltimore School for the Arts student Jacqueline Green performed the Arabian dance in the school’s “Nutcracker.”

“I just remember looking at this woman and being shocked at the facility that she had as such a tall dancer, and I felt like I saw myself,” Mitchell said. “She was such an inspiration for me.”

Mitchell watched Green’s rise at Ailey during her own years at the school for the arts, and when she successfully auditioned for Ailey herself in 2019­ — after two years with the junior company — it was like “getting to dance with [my] heroes.”

Alisha Rena Peek, who grew up in Prince George’s County, first saw Ailey in a “precious moment” when she was 5. Her dance teacher, a former member of Ailey’s junior company, somehow got permission to take her students on Ailey’s tour bus.

Peek thinks of that childhood trip every time Ailey tours to Washington, especially when relatives, friends and former teachers wait to say hi after every show.

“In some ways, I felt like the darling of the DMV,” said Mack, who recalled seeing everyone from her brother’s soccer coach to her high school Spanish teacher at stage door.

During her past seven years as the director of dance at the Juilliard School, Mack said, she’s continued to spot dancers from Maryland and the District, including Miranda Quinn, who joined Ailey in 2019 after studying with Mack at Juilliard.

“When I do learn that a dancer is from the DMV, most of the time, it makes sense to me, because usually that dancer is very well versed in many different dance languages,” Mack said. “They’re what I call chameleons.”

And it’s entirely possible more of those local chameleons will fill Alvin Ailey’s ranks.

“There are eyes on the next generation of talent in that area,” Mack said. “It’s so important to create a pipeline and a pathway for young dancers.”