Ellen A. Gniazdowski, who taught ballet to generations of Baltimore students for more than 65 years, died of complications from a stroke Aug. 11 at a daughter’s Millsboro, Delaware, home. The former Mount Washington resident was 94.
“Ellen worked tirelessly to give her students opportunities to perform,” wrote a daughter, Valerie Griffith, of Charles Village and Millsboro, in a biographical profile.
“In addition to producing 49 annual dance recitals, she created the Baltimore Concert Group out of her studio, which over 40 years performed in and around the Baltimore area for community organizations, festivals and many years at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor Summer Concert Series,” she wrote.
Ellen Ann Pimm, the daughter of Walter Britton Pimm, a U.S. Department of Labor official, and Rosemary Throne Pimm, a dancer, was born in Baltimore and raised in Mount Washington.
During the Great Depression and World War II years her mother established a school of theater and dance in the carriage house of her Mount Washington home.
Mrs. Gniazdowski developed a love for classic ballet early and traveled weekly to Philadelphia and Washington to study ballet with luminaries like Michael Nicholoff, a member of the famed dancer Anna Pavlova’s company.
An interest in costume design led her to be accepted by the Fashion Institute in New York, but just after graduating from Forest Park High School, she met and fell in love with William Leo Gniazdowski, a student at the University of Maryland.
“So I could see him every weekend,” Mrs. Gniazdowski told The Baltimore Sun in 1997, she enrolled at College Park instead.
She studied physical education before leaving because the university did not offer a degree in dance.
The two married in 1948.
She returned to Baltimore where she inherited her mother’s studio which she named The Gniazdowska Studio of Ballet.
“She feminized the name of her dance studio by adding an ‘a’ to its surname,” Ms. Grifith said.
In the 1960s, she and fellow dancer, Danny Diamond, founded the Baltimore City Ballet which eventually morphed into the Maryland State Ballet.
When potential students came to Mrs. Gniazdowski, she told the old Sunday Sun Magazine in 1966, she looked at the “arch in instep, length of leg, smoothness of muscle, set of shoulders — the body development able to take training demanded by ballet.”
She was the stage director, choreographer and costume-maker and teacher as she prepared her students for their recitals.
“A number of well-known students studied with my mother,” her daughter said.
Among them were the famed Block ecdysiast, Blaze Starr, and then WJZ-TV celebrity Oprah Winfrey.
“My mother also taught the football team at Poly [Baltimore Polytechnic Institute] how to move,” Ms. Griffith said.
In 1997, she announced her retirement and told The Sun that at 67 it was getting “a little wearying,” but she continued teaching for another decade.
Her husband, who taught math at Carver Vocational-Technical High School, died in 1992.
After moving to Millsboro in 2015, she joined Lighthouse Baptist Church where funeral services were held Aug. 17.
Graveside services will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at Woodlawn Cemetery at 2130 Woodlawn Drive in Woodlawn.
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a son, Ryan Gniazdowski, of Greensboro, Caroline County; another daughter, Mary Antonia Schrock, of Millsboro; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.