Our Fabulous Instructors

Lisa Racina-Torre is a native of Denton, Texas, and holds a BFA in Ballet from Texas Christian University, where she was the recipient of the Arts Guild Scholarship for Dance her Junior and Senior years.  She started Denton Dance Conservatory (DDC) in 1988 and continues as DDC’s Owner/Director.  In 1991, she founded and is the Artistic Director of the Denton City Contemporary Ballet, a non-profit dance company and it’s youth outreach company, DCCB II.  Over the past 30 years, Ms. Racina-Torre has choreographed extensively for the company as well as Denton Community Theatre, the Music Theatre of Denton, UNT Drama Dept., Wichita School of Performing Arts, Interlochen Arts Academy, and others. Her company sponsors the Annual COLLAGE: Denton Dance Festival, holiday production, “A Gift for Emma,” the Community Master Class Series, the DCCB Educational Touring Program, & the DCCB Annual Scholarship for Summer Study. Ms. Racina-Torre has spent two summers on the faculty at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, served as adjunct professor of Ballet at University of North Texas, and was selected as one of only 20 choreographers in the U.S. to attend the Regional Dance America Craft of Choreography workshop in the summers of 2001 & 2003. She formerly served on the Scholarship Selection Committee and Board of Directors of the Dance Council of North Texas. Her students have been accepted to highly respected summer dance and university programs all over the country, as well as dancing & teaching professionally, competing and winning dance competitions, etc. Ms. Racina-Torre has taken the Denton City Contemporary Ballet on two European tours to Austria as part of the Young Tanzsommer  Dance Festival in 2011 and 2014, as well as New York City in the summer of 2017 to study dance at some of the most famous schools in the world.  She continues to guest teach around the metroplex too!

Ms. Fiona trained with Claire Corbett at a local school in Gloucester UK and performed at local pantomimes, circus performances, festivals and competitions. She was even lucky enough to get picked to play a young Anna Pavlova when Ballet Creations of London came to the area to perform. Ms. Piper then began training with the Royal Ballet School as a Senior Associate. At 16 she was accepted and trained at Royal Ballet Upper School. The school was still housed with the company at this time and she was lucky enough to spend all day training in the same studios as legends Sylvie Guillem, Darcy Bussell and Jonathon Cope. While training at RBS she performed in Raymonda at the London Collisium.

In 2010 Fiona started teaching at Leamington and Warwick Academy of Dance under the principal Viv Kibble. Miss Kibble inspired her to get her teaching certificates with the IDTA (training with renowned Modern & Tap teachers Carl Walker & Ian Meeson-achieved with 96/100) and my CBTS degree with the Royal Academy of Dance. She is now fully qualified to teach and submit students for exams for the RAD and IDTA up to Advanced grades. She continued to learn from Miss Kibble and became a confident Tap teacher and have even taught Hip-hop and Can-Can to some adventurous adults. She has taught students from 2-70 years old and has a long and successful record for over 10 years training and getting them successfully through their RAD and IDTA exams from Pre-Primary to Advanced. 

Fiona also worked with the school’s performance group ‘Synergy’ and choreographed, taught and polished numerous competition and performance pieces for them and went on tour with them to Germany, Disneyland Paris and all around England.

Fiona’s students have been accepted as Junior Associates at Elmhurst, and Royal Ballet School and gone on to study at Northern Ballet, Ballet West, Royal Ballet School, Rambert, Italia Conti and many more.

DDC is so lucky to have Ms. Fiona on our Faculty! She will be teaching beginning through advanced levels of ballet, tap, jazz to our DDC dancers ages 3-Adult.

“I can’t wait to get back to what I love and pass on my knowledge and passion of Ballet and Dance to another generation. “