Bertina Sixto Dew is Executive Director of Kingsport Ballet. She formed the Parents Coalition in 1999, which transformed Kingsport Guild of Ballet into a non-profit, and merged it with State of Franklin Dance Alliance resulting in Kingsport Ballet. In 1999 she designed a capital campaign, which raised funds to renovate a new facility downtown with three studios and a mini-theatre. Ms. Dew was in charge of Kingsport Ballet’s search committee in 2001, recruiting Valeria Sinyavskaya, artistic director and ballet mistress from Russia by way of Tokyo, Japan. Ms. Dew has been instrumental in organizing numerous collaborations between regional arts and non-arts organizations between 2000 and 2006. Ms. Dew is grant writer and fundraiser for the organization, in addition to being costume and set designer for such ballets as Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker. She was involved in the coordination of the art and the artists for the first “Evening With the Arts,” a yearly event with the Downtown Kingsport Association. She has been active in the implementation of the DANCE CO project (Developing Artists and Nurturing Cultural Education through Community Outreach), which works with non-arts, community organizations such as Boys and Girls Club, Girls, Inc. and area elementary schools serving at-risk children to provide classical ballet instruction at no cost to the students. Ms. Dew secured a $10,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant for fiscal year 06-07 for the outreach program. Prior to her becoming executive director, she specialized in oil portraits and murals, and worked in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Augusta, GA. She received a Masters degree in Art Therapy from the George Washington University and Bachelors in Art Education from Florida State University. She is originally from Uruguay and currently lives in Kingsport, Tennessee with her husband Michael and three daughters. Ms. Dew has served on the Arts Council of Greater Kingsport’s board of directors for several years.