Leonid Zhdanov

Biography

Zhdanov was born on June 23, 1927 in Moscow, Russia. He was a pupil of Nikolai Tarasov and when he graduated from Bolshoi Ballet. He participated in double roles with such famous principal dancers as Galina Ulanova, Raisa Struchkova, Maya Plisetskaya, Alicia Alonso, and many others. Later on, he became a teacher at the Bolshoi Theatre where he taught such dancers as Dmitri Goudanov and Andrei Fedotov. He also was inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson, a French photographer and kept a collection of 400,000 negatives of his ballet dances. He died on May 14, 2009.