Starting With One Student

Catalina moved to San Antonio first in the summer of 2010 to begin building the school, while Ernesto stayed behind in Chicago to continue working. That entire first summer, our one student came faithfully three times a week.

There is one memory from that summer we will never forget. Catalina called Ernesto crying and said, “Nobody knows who we are here. We may not make it.”

Ernesto answered, “We just started. We love teaching. People will come.”

Slowly, they did.

By November, we had enough students for Ernesto to leave Chicago and join us permanently in San Antonio.

In those early years, we did everything ourselves. We taught classes, cleaned the studio, answered phones, handled administrative work, planned performances, spoke with parents, and took care of whatever needed to be done.

At the same time, we were raising our son.

We had spent our lives in professional dance, so high-quality training and strong standards would always be important to us. But becoming parents also changed the way we thought about teaching. We wanted to take dance seriously while still remembering that every dancer who walked into our studio was someone’s child.

In 2012, just two years after opening, we moved into a 6,000-square-foot studio. For us, that move was the moment we realized the little school we had started with one student was becoming something real.

San Antonio had become home.

Growing Into Quenedit Dance

As the school grew, we began thinking about what else we wanted to offer our dancers.

We believed students needed opportunities to perform, work with artists, and experience the stage as part of their dance education. In 2014, we created Quenedit Dance Theatre, a nonprofit performing organization that would later begin doing business as San Antonio Dance.

One of its first major projects was The Nutcracker, which became an annual tradition for our dancers and families. Over time, we added our Festival and continued creating more opportunities for dancers to perform.

Today, Quenedit Dance and San Antonio Dance have different but connected purposes.

Quenedit Dance is our school, where students come to train and grow as dancers. San Antonio Dance is our nonprofit performing organization, which gives us the opportunity to create productions, support artists, expand performance opportunities, and develop scholarships for students.

In 2026, as we prepared to move into our new permanent home, we also changed the name of the school from Quenedit Ballet School to Quenedit Dance.

Ballet is still at the heart of what we do. It shaped both of us as dancers and teachers, and it remains the technical foundation of our school. But over sixteen years, our programs had grown beyond ballet, and we felt the name should reflect the school as it is today.

Why We Teach

Our greatest reward has always been watching our students grow.

Sometimes we meet a student when they are three years old and still learning how to stand in line, listen to a teacher, and make it through their first dance class. Then, somehow, years pass and we are watching that same student perform onstage or prepare to graduate from high school.

Some of our students have gone on to professional training, university programs, teaching, performing, and other careers in the arts. When a student tells us they want to pursue dance professionally, we understand what that dream asks of them because we lived it ourselves.

We know the excitement and opportunities that can come with a life in the arts, but we also know how much discipline, sacrifice, and work it requires. Our job is to be honest with those students, train them well, and help them understand what it will take to pursue that path.

But most children who take dance will not become professional dancers, and we don’t believe they need to.

Over the years, we have watched students gain confidence, learn how to work hard, make close friendships, and surprise themselves with what they are capable of doing. We have seen former students come back to teach, help backstage, attend performances, or simply stop by to say hello.

Those moments mean a great deal to us because they remind us that dance can stay with a person even when they are no longer taking class.

We want our students to leave Quenedit Dance with excellent training, but we also want them to leave with confidence, discipline, friendships, and an appreciation for the arts.

Whether dance becomes your child’s profession or simply an important part of their childhood, we want their years here to mean something to them.

The Next Chapter

Our journey has not always been easy. In 2020, COVID closed our doors, and almost overnight we lost nearly 90 percent of our students. Rebuilding the school took years. There were difficult choices, financial uncertainty, and times when keeping the doors open required everything we had.

We kept going because we believed in what we had built and in the students, families, and teachers who had become part of it.

Today, as we build a permanent home for Quenedit Dance, we find ourselves thinking less about simply growing the school and more about its future.

We want to continue bringing talented teachers into the school and mentoring the next generation of teachers and leaders. Through San Antonio Dance, we want to create more productions and performance opportunities and continue supporting artists in our community.

We also want to expand our scholarship opportunities. We have seen talented, dedicated young dancers whose families cannot always afford the amount of training their child needs. We want to be able to help more of those students.

Sixteen years ago, we came to San Antonio hoping to build a life closer to family. We could not have imagined that this city would give us another family entirely.

The school that began with one student is now filled with dancers, families, teachers, and artists. Some students have been with us from their first dance class through high school graduation. Some have returned to teach. Others have gone on to lives that have nothing to do with dance but still come back to visit.

As we look ahead, that is what matters most to us.

We want Quenedit Dance to remain a place where the quality of the training matters, where teachers know their students, and where children can be challenged without losing the joy that brought them to dance in the first place.

We started with one student and a belief that if we loved what we did, people would eventually find us.

Sixteen years later, we still love teaching. And we still believe that what a child learns through dance can stay with them long after they leave the studio.