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Just about every corner of Julie Burton’s Silver Lake studio is filled with sparkling glass jewelry — some real, some symbolic — and whimsical ceramic figures inspired by Midcentury Modern design.

Elegant hand-blown glass vases sit beside ceramic crater pots on warm cherry shelves. Bright teardrop earrings hang from metal tins filled with Japanese cooling beads. In the kitchen, hand-carved ceramic birds, whales, elephants and owls look out from the counters, surrounded by lidded cache pots and heavy candlestick holders that feel good in your hand. Nature shows up everywhere in her studio: rocks in glass jars, pieces of driftwood and tiny “forests” she’s made from glass, brass and walnut.

“I’m a full-time hallucinator without drugs,” Burton says jokingly about her wide range of work. “If I’m not making something, I’m always looking around and thinking about what to make next.”

A metal desk she found on Craigslist anchors the 546-square-foot accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, where she works. Architect Peter Kim designed the space, attached to her garage in Silver Lake, to be private and full of light, with 10-foot ceilings, skylights and glass doors that open onto a large patio with seating.

Her workspace shows how productive she is. Long, colorful glass tubes fill pails on the floor and her desk. Tools are scattered throughout the studio, including a plumber’s torch for melting glass, crockpots for pickling and a dental tool she uses to stamp her logo, VM, short for Verre Modern, onto her ceramics.

At 56, the Los Angeles native took an unusual route to becoming an artist. After earning a degree in political science from UC Berkeley, she worked at Amoeba in San Francisco and later joined the fashion brand Esprit. “I was supposed to be a data-entry person,” she says, “but I taught myself Quark and became a pattern maker.”

She admits she didn’t really know what she was doing. “I have a habit of taking jobs and changing them a bit. I’ve been lucky to be able to shape the jobs I’ve had.”

At one point, she considered becoming a professor of legal ethics, so, as the daughter of two lawyers, she applied to law school. “That would be an interesting job today,” she adds with a dry sense of humor.

“Built-in desks, cabinets, shelves and a functioning kitchen with counter seating provide a light-filled artist’s studio easily convertible to a spacious living space,” architect Peter Kim says of the ADU.

Burton melts glass for jewelry with a plumbing torch.

She had always loved art, especially glass-blowing, but classes were too expensive. On a whim, she also applied to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, or RISD. When she didn’t get into her top law schools, she chose RISD instead. There, she majored in illustration and took a six-week winter glass-working course that changed her life.

“I immediately thought, ‘This is the best. I want to do this,’” she says. “I didn’t think, ‘Can I do glass blowing for a living?’” When she realized she didn’t want to create art glass, her professor encouraged her to leave and “save $90,000 on tuition for something she wasn’t 100% behind.”

When a RISD friend introduced her to a glassblower in Chattanooga who had blown glass on an oil rig, Burton moved to Tennessee and worked for the former merchant marine, making what she describes as “funky glass.”

She later moved to New York and worked at the nonprofit Urban Glass in Brooklyn. To pay off her student loans, she also waited tables and tutored kids for the PSAT and SAT.

After a friend gave her a quick five-minute lesson in lampworking — a type of glasswork that uses a torch or lamp to melt glass — she got so excited that she decided to start a jewelry business, although she says she “knew nothing about jewelry.”

Glass necklaces, starting at $140, come in 135 different colors.

After a brutal winter in New York and as her parents got older, she decided to move back to Los Angeles in 2003. In L.A., she met her husband, had a son who is about to turn 15 and continued to grow her Verre Modern jewelry line. Over time, her work expanded to include glass and brass mobiles and wall hangings, which are now sold in independent shops and museum gift stores across the country.

Designer Carol Young has carried Burton’s jewelry at her Undesigned showroom in Los Feliz for 20 years. Young says that Burton “transforms humble glass into modern heirlooms — simple, elegant, quietly precious pieces for women who don’t need the obviousness of gemstones or status jewelry. My everyday pair are her clear glass Valenti earrings, which somehow go with absolutely everything.”

When she took a ceramics class in 2015, she started making vases, animals and decor, often hand-building and carving her unique vessels while watching TV in her living room. Like with most things, she says, she made ceramics her own.

“When I was blowing urban glass, I didn’t use traditional Italian glass-blowing techniques because I worked for a guy on a mountain in Tennessee,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about jewelry, but a five-minute lampworking lesson set me on my path. If someone who does ceramics for a living were to watch me do what I do with clay, they’d say that’s not the right way to do it.”

Burton worked in a studio on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles for 20 years before she and her husband added the ADU in 2023. “It was built with the idea that we might live in the studio someday or let a family member live there,” she says, adding with a laugh: “It’s embarrassingly nice as a working studio. That is definitely not how my studio downtown looked.”

Burton’s kitchen features Inax Japanese ceramic tile and untreated cherry cabinets.

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The cutouts in the fence around her patio just outside the ADU are lined with her ceramics, sand dollars, driftwood and rocks from Burton’s travels. “I’m inspired by nature,” she says.

The one-bedroom, one-bathroom ADU was built on an unused side yard of the large corner lot, so the two-car garage could still be used for storage and parking. Architect Kim says, “While converting a garage to an ADU can add living space or rental income, they’re often small, need a lot of structural work and take away storage.” He adds, “Building an ADU on unused space lets you keep the garage and, like with Julie’s ADU, creates a spacious, private front patio connected to her studio and living room.”

Burton looks back on her unique career path and feels grateful she can choose her own direction. When she studied illustration at RISD, she recalls being surrounded by talented drafters. “I wasn’t the best illustrator, and I remember the professor told me that half of illustrations are ideas. That was inspiring.”

That idea continues to inspire her art, even after many years.

“I’ve tried welding, woodworking, painting, drawing, glass-blowing, lampworking and working with clay,” she says about working with her hands. “Give me a medium, and I’ll give it a go.”

Burton works on a facet bowl in her Los Feliz living room.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

One of the first things Tamara Rojo did when she became artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet in 2022 was to commission a major new work on a very hot, very San Francisco topic: AI.

“I wanted to be somewhere where the answer is, ‘Let’s try,’ rather than, ‘We’ve never done it this way,’” Rojo told NPR about her decision to move to a city known globally for innovation. Rojo had spent decades working in the United Kingdom, first as a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet and English National Ballet and then as artistic director and lead principal dancer with the English National Ballet.

The ballet she commissioned for San Francisco, Mere Mortals, was boundary-pushing on a number of fronts.

San Francisco Ballet’s new work about AI, Mere Mortals, presents a departure for the nearly 100-year-old dance institution.

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The jagged, earthbound movement, grainy electronic-driven soundtrack and pulsating AI-generated visuals of the hour-long ballet, presented a departure for the company programmatically. Also, Rojo’s choreographer pick, Aszure Barton, was the first woman ever commissioned to create a full-length work in the San Francisco Ballet’s nearly 100-year history – in an industry where most new dances are still created by men.

“What I love about Tamara is that she is defiant in what she believes in,” Barton said at the San Francisco Ballet’s headquarters during a break from rehearsing Mere Mortals. “This was a huge risk for her. It could have failed.”

Ballet can be a pretty conservative artform, with many companies trundling out Swan Lakes, Nutcrackers, and Cinderellas year after year. Every now and again, though, someone like Rojo comes along and truly shakes things up – even if that has meant ruffling tutus in the process.

Moving beyond limits

Rojo’s desire to move beyond accepted limits is a hallmark of her career. “She has extraordinary ambition,” dance writer Rachel Howard said.

Rojo was only 19 when she volunteered to represent her small, Madrid-based dance school and company at the prestigious Paris International Dance competition in 1994.

During her years as a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, Tamara Rojo danced many famous roles including Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty. In this 2006 dress rehearsal at The Royal Opera House, the Cuban ballet star Carlos Acosta partnered Rojo as Prince Florimund.

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“I don’t know what happened, but my hand went up,” Rojo said. “I didn’t think about it. I just went ‘me!’”

She won gold, and soon went on to dance for the Scottish National Ballet, the English National Ballet, and, starting in 2000, the Royal Ballet.

The ballerina became known for her consummate technique as well as her ability to bring emotional depth to roles like Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, and Giselle.

“Tragically sensual as one could want,” wrote New York Times critic John Rockwell in a review of Rojo’s performance of a duet from Ondine at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2004.

She also somehow found the time to earn a Ph.D. in the psychology of elite dancers from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.

“She was truly one of the great international ballet stars of the last 40 years, at least,” said Howard.

Daring and success

Rojo has taken that same boundless ambition from the stage to the artistic director’s chair — making moves that match daring with success.

As the English National Ballet’s artistic director and lead principal dancer from 2012 to 2022, she helped transform the company into an international dance powerhouse, in large part through her radical approach to programming. Rojo’s efforts included bringing ballet to the Glastonbury Festival for the first time in the event’s history, and commissioning an Indian Kathak dance-infused reimagining of the beloved classic Giselle from choreographer Akram Kahn.

She also managed to keep the company financially afloat by offering up crowd-pleasing fare like The Nutcracker and a “swashbuckling romp” of a production of Le Corsaire, and oversaw its move from a cramped building in the “old money” South Kensington neighborhood of London to sprawling new studios in hip Canning Town.

Akram Khan and Tamara Rojo, pictured in London in 2013, have become frequent collaborators.

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“Rojo was hugely resourceful and creative about how she revitalized that company,” Howard said.

Sitting in her office at the San Francisco Ballet in dressy white sweatpants and an extravagantly ruffled blue blouse, the Spanish native, who turns 52 on Sunday, said the survival of her artform depends, at least in part, on risk-taking.

“Other than Nutcracker — which is this fabulous thing that keeps us all alive — every time you bring back the same work, less people will come,” Rojo said. “You are cannibalizing yourself. So that’s not really a long-term strategy that you can rely on.”

A risk pays off

The risks Rojo has taken with Mere Mortals seem to be paying off.

The production was recently remounted in San Francisco (it premiered in 2024), and will also be seen by audiences at the Edinburgh International Festival and Sadler’s Wells in London this summer. According to the company, it has brought in millions of dollars in ticket sales and drawn crowds of first-time ticket-buyers to the San Francisco Ballet.

A scene featuring dancer Wei Wang in San Francisco Ballet’s Mere Mortals.

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Many of them have stuck around for the post-performance DJ parties. These are part of Rojo’s ongoing desire to open things up by turning the company’s lobby into a friendlier space involving collaborations with local cultural groups and artists.

“We have this platform. We don’t have to be a gatekeeper. That’s actually bad for the arts,” Rojo said. “And so who else can we invite to be part of our actions?”

Perhaps most importantly for the company, Mere Mortals inspired a whopping, $60 million gift from an anonymous donor — one of the largest ever given to an American ballet company. This windfall is mainly earmarked to fund new work. Barton, the choreographer, said she remembers when Rojo invited the donor into the rehearsal room.

“She’s very convincing when she believes in something,” Barton said. “If I had the means, I would give it to her too.”

A difference of vision?

But not everyone is on board with the changes she’s made and her leadership style.

In 2018, during her time leading the English National Ballet, the U.K. publication The Times quoted a group of unnamed dancers who it said had accused Rojo of perpetuating a culture of intimidation and downplaying injury. Those dancers also objected to her romantic relationship with one of her company’s lead dancers, Isaac Hernandez, who moved with her to the San Francisco Ballet. They have a son together, but have since separated. NPR has not independently confirmed the allegations.

Tamara Rojo and associate artistic director Antonio Castilla observing rehearsal for the San Francisco Ballet’s recent production of Don Quixote.

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In a 2018 statement, English National Ballet said the company had worked with Rojo “from the start to implement improvements across the company,” including better access to medical care, more training for managers and a new building. Arts Council England, which funds and supports the arts across that country, said at the time it was satisfied with the new policies and processes put into place; English National Ballet said it worked with “unions and staff to ensure that feedback was heard and concerns were addressed. Asked about the allegations this week, the ballet told NPR that “No formal grievances were substantiated.”

Looking back, Rojo says that it was challenging to learn how to be a manager while still dancing, and to make changes in an industry where management is so male-dominated. A 2025 report from the Dance Data Project revealed of the 217 artistic directors leading classically based dance companies in the U.S. and internationally, 30% are women, while 70% are men.

“I came in very strong and very fast,” Rojo said. “And that, combined with ‘Women that succeed need to be put in their place,’ was very difficult.”

Tamara Rojo and Isaac Hernandez in London, 2016.

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It’s hard to say if similar disagreements over leadership happened when she took over San Francisco Ballet. A handful of high-profile company members have left, including Hernandez. The dancers declined to comment. San Francisco Ballet said the number of roster changes is similar to the number before her tenure.

“Not everybody’s going to agree with my vision,” Rojo said.

Some San Francisco Ballet dancers concur.

“Like any leadership change, sometimes people feel aligned with it and sometimes not,” said principal dancer Sasha De Sola. “The role of an artistic director is to bring their creative vision and continue to build.”

Cultivating dance leaders of the future

Part of Rojo’s creative vision is an unusual, new two-year program aimed at identifying and training the next generation of dance leaders while they continue to perform on stage. De Sola is a participant.

“Many times you’re required to almost wait until the end of your [ballet] career to be able to pursue these things,” De Sola said. “And I feel grateful that I’ve been able to do these in tandem.”

Rojo said she believes ballet dancers are capable of being great leaders if they’re taught how to do it. “You just need to have a vision that is specific and relevant to the institution that you want to direct and that is financially sustainable,” she said. “And you also need to make great art.”

Jennifer Vanasco edited this story for broadcast and web.