A renowned choreographer, Twyla Tharp is known for taking a wrecking ball to the wall between modern dance and ballet.

An Indiana native and daughter of a car dealer, Tharp trained with dance world icons Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, concurrently studying at the American Ballet Theater. She soon moved on to Paul Taylor's dance company, defecting again in 1965 to form her own dance troupe, Twyla Tharp Dance. Since then, she's choreographed hundreds of dances: her noteworthy works include Deuce Coup (performed to the music of the Beach Boys), As Time Goes By (to the music of Fats Waller), and Push Comes to Shove (a 1976 collaboration with Mikhail Baryshnikov); it was Tharp, too, who choreographed the dances in the 1979 film version of Hair. A notorious perfectionist, she's been known to hound her dancers until they get their moves exactly right, Tharp is credited with creating dances that fuse modern dance with ballet.

Although she's long been considered a queen in the world of dance, she became something of a household name in 2002 with Movin' Out, the jukebox musical set to the songs of Billy Joel. The production was Tharp's biggest commercial success; it ran on Broadway for three years, was well-received by critics, and earned Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Choreography. Alas, things didn't go as smoothly with 2006's The Times They Are A-Changin', which was set to Bob Dylan's music. Featuring dances based on such toe-tappers as "Blowing in the Wind," the show was almost universally panned-"when a genius [Tharp] goes down in flames, everybody feels the burn," cringed the Times' Ben Brantley-and it closed less than a month after it opened. Unable to learn her lesson, she released Come Fly Away, a dance revue of Frank Sinatra's music, to mixed reviews.

Tharp was once married to the painter Robert Huot. Over the years, she's had romances with Mikhail Baryshnikov, New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, and rock promoter Bill Graham. [Image via Getty]