Welcome!

Vintage Pointe is where to find me: Dr Caitlyn Lehmann. I’m a cultural historian specialising in the reception and development of ballet in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Although I have a particular interest in British theatrical history, I undertake research across various aspects and periods of dance on commission.

Australian readers are most likely to recognise me from my work for The Australian Ballet.  I’ve been a regular freelance writer for the company for some years now, contributing specialist research-based programme articles and online content. Having dabbled in dance journalism on and off – penning articles and interviewing for publications including Dance Australia – these days my focus is largely on the slow burn of academic writing. From 2012 to 2022, I was the Australian critic for the UK’s Dancing Times. 

On the academic side, I’m an Honorary Fellow with School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne (UoM). I’m always happy to assist graduate students and colleagues with ballet-related questions or the development of their own research topics. I’ve previously held roles as a Research Coordinator for the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Contemporary Culture (ERCC) Unit, and worked as a Research Assistant to Professor Clara Tuite and Professor Emeritus Gillian Russell. I also give occasional lectures for the Dance School at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Career highlights have included an invited speaker appearance for the ‘Ballerina’ symposium hosted by The Museum at FIT in New York in 2020 (held to accompany the Museum’s fashion exhibition of that name). In the same year, I was awarded ‘The ‘John M. Ward Fellowship in Dance and Music for the Theatre’ by the Houghton Library at Harvard University, which I was delighted to take up in May-June 2022 after international borders reopened.

More quirky highlights along the way have included being a (too-minor-to-make-the-credits) research contributor for the 2015 BBC documentary The King Who Invented Ballet, and curating an open-house exhibition of historical ballet prints, titled ‘From Court to Kitsch: Images of Ballet from the 17th to 20th Century‘. 

After a two-year hiatus working full-time in professional services for UoM’s Melbourne Research and Enterprise unit, I’m delighted to be research-active again. Damn, it’s good to be back! Somewhere in there, colleagues and I joined forces to form what has become the Melbourne-based BalletXR (Ballet by Research) group. In October 2025 we hosted the symposium ‘Haunted? Locating the Spectral in Australasian Ballet‘ and we are anticipating a second symposium in late 2027 – please reach out to join the mailing list!

Somewhere betwixt all that, I manage to be a keen Pilates enthusiast, a wishful interior designer, and a plantaholic obsessed with wisteria, ferns and moss. If you’re reading my online posts, you’ll also discover I’ve written the odd full-length ballet scenario. And seriously, folks, I’m begging for someone in the ballet community to let me be an observer or consultant to the dramaturgical process.