Tiit Helimets has been selected as Sacramento Ballet’s next artistic director.
Erik Tomasson
For acclaimed dancer Tiit Helimets, what helped sell him on becoming Sacramento Ballet’s artistic director was the people he met locally.
Helimets, whose hiring was announced Wednesday by the ballet, spent roughly two decades as a principal dancer for the San Francisco Ballet and has done guest choreography and other work for a variety of companies.
When he visited Sacramento he became enchanted with the excitement and energy of residents he’d met, he said in a phone interview.
“I want to work with people like this who are passionate and forward-looking and hopeful for the community and for the arts,” Helimets said. “It’s infectious. You want to be part of that.”
Helimets will begin his role at the start of the 2026-27 season. He is the latest leader for a company that has existed since 1954 and had remarkable continuity with artistic leadership. The company has enjoyed long tenures of both co-founder Barbara Crockett and husband-wife team Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda, who led the company for about 30 years.
The question now is what levels of success Helimets can achieve with the Sacramento Ballet.
Who is Tiit Helimets?
From Estonia, Helimets danced for the Estonian National Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet before joining San Francisco Ballet as a principal dancer in 2005. He remained in the role until 2023 and returned for as a guest the following year with his longtime partner Yuan Yuan Tan.
David Rubien wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009 about Tan and Helimets’ partner work during a performance of “Swan Lake” in Beijing. “In the Act 3 Palace Ballroom scene, the pas de deux was so intense that it turned into a superhuman competition between Tan and Helimets, and the audience lost its collective breath,” Rubien wrote.
Kiera Anderson, who was hired as Sacramento Ballet’s executive director in January, hailed the selection of Helimets. “He’s so passionate about the art form, he’s so passionate about accessibility of the art form,” Anderson said. “He’s just tremendously well-respected in the industry, both as a dancer, as a choreographer, as a coach.”
Sacramento Ballet Board President Alyssa Paoletti said that the company posted the artistic director position before its annual performances of “The Nutcracker.” There were around 50 applicants.
Paoletti served on a subcommittee that evaluated candidates. She was struck both by Helimets’ artistic ability and his business acumen. “He had a lot of initiative and a sincere authenticity to spread the joy of ballet to everyone,” Paoletti said.
Helimets recently helped stage a ballet in Berlin about dance legend Rudolf Nureyev, who Cunningham and Binda knew at Boston Ballet.
A news release from Sacramento Ballet on Wednesday noted that Helimets had danced works from noted choreographers like Nureyev, William Forsythe and the George Balanchine. Over the years, Sacramento Ballet has staged Balanchine’s work numerous times. Helimets would like to continue this.
“Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and all the other choreographers like Tudor, Agnes de Mille, Martha Graham … I love all of their work,” Helimets said. “I think these are just such important landmarks in the history of dance in America that need to be highlighted, and need to have opportunities to grace our stages,
Helimets will live in Sacramento full-time for his job but will be on his own for his first year in town. His daughter, who is 16, is studying at Paris Opera Ballet School and his wife, a former dancer, is with her.
Who Helimets follows
Helimets will be just the fifth artistic director for the ballet since Cunningham’s hiring in 1988. At 48, Helimets is the same age Cunningham was when he was hired.
Cunningham spent 30 years leading Sacramento Ballet and helped the company acheive international recognition. For much of that time, Cunningham’s wife Carinne Binda served as co-artistic director. They left the company in 2018.
The ballet has been paying tribute recently to Cunningham, who died on March 7 at 86 following an extended battle with pancreatic cancer. Anderson said the company has named its 2026-27 season “Legacy in Motion,” partly in Cunningham’s honor.
Binda said via text Wednesday that Helimets was “a beautiful dancer … known for his elegant dancing, nuanced partnering and versatility” and that she hoped his leadership would bring the “company to new heights and his vision is embraced by the community.”
Former Sacramento Ballet dancer Amy Seiwert succeeded Cunningham and Binda in 2018 as artistic director. She was laid off in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and now serves as artistic director for Smuin Ballet in San Francisco.
After Seiwert departed Sacramento Ballet, Anthony Krutzkamp served in a dual role as executive director and artistic director for about four years. He left the company last summer and is now Louisville Ballet’s artistic director.
The artistic director position has been effectively vacant for several months. Rehearsal directors Stefan Calka and Elise Elliott choreographed a recent run of “Sleeping Beauty.”
Hope for the future
Anderson said she’d already spoken many times with Helimets about the ballet’s upcoming season.
“He is coming in with fresh ideas, fresh perspective, with incredible relationships in the dance world and he has a real respect for the traditions and legacy that exist at Sacramento Ballet,” Anderson said. “He really is bought into the community… and knows what the ballet means to our Sacramento community.”
Paoletti sounded hopeful as well about Helimets.
“He will propel us nationally and internationally,” Paoletti said.
This story was originally published March 26, 2026 at 3:30 PM.
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Graham Womack is a general assignment reporter for The Sacramento Bee. Prior to joining The Bee full-time in September 2025, he freelanced for the publication for several years. His work has won several California Journalism Awards and spurred state legislation.