Early Life
Ballas was born in Houston, Texas, the son of dancers Corky Ballas and Shirley Ballas (née Rich). His paternal grandparents were of Mexican, Spanish, and Greek background, and his mother is British. His paternal grandfather, George Ballas, was the inventor of the Weed Eater lawn-trimming device.
Ballas attended Rosemead Preparatory school in South London, and was in the same year as acclaimed British ballet dancer Max Westwell of the English National Ballet.
At the age of 11, he earned a full-time slot at the Academy, as well as earning a full scholarship to the college. In 2005, he was awarded "Performer of the Year". He then moved on to win championships at The British Open to the World, The US Open to the World, and The International Open to the World. With his former partner Julianne Hough, he won the Junior Latin American Dance Championship and the gold medal at the Junior Olympics.
As a youth, Ballas was a member of a pop singing trio called "2B1G"(2 Boys 1 Girl"), along with Julianne Hough and Derek Hough.
Ballas' mother, an award-winning Latin American dancer, was recently featured on Dancing with the Stars.
Read more about this topic: Mark Ballas
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)