Maddie Ziegler
Madison Nicole Ziegler (/ˈzɪɡlər/;[1] born September 30, 2002; age 21[2]) is an American actress and dancer. She appeared in Lifetime's reality show Dance Moms, from 2011 (at age 8) until 2016, and starred in a series of music videos by Sia, beginning with "Chandelier" and "Elastic Heart", which have in total attracted more than 6 billion views on YouTube. Ziegler has appeared in films, television shows, concerts, advertisements and on magazine covers.
Ziegler was a judge on the 2016 season of So You Think You Can Dance: The Next Generation, toured with Sia in North America and Australia in 2016 and 2017 and has given dance tours with her sister, Mackenzie. Her 2017 memoir, The Maddie Diaries, was a New York Times Best Seller.[3] Her film roles include Camille Le Haut in the animated film Ballerina (2016), Christina Sickleman in The Book of Henry (2017), the title role in Music (2021), Mia in the high school drama The Fallout (2021), Velma in Steven Spielberg's 2021 West Side Story and Lindy in Fitting In (2023).
Ziegler was included by Time magazine on its list of the "30 most influential teens" in each year from 2015 to 2017. She was included in the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Hollywood & Entertainment category. Her social media presence includes an Instagram account with more than 13 million followers.[4]
Early life and education
Ziegler was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Melissa Ziegler-Gisoni and Kurt Ziegler, who owned a mortgage company.[5] She is of Polish, German and Italian descent.[6] Her parents divorced in 2011, and her mother married Greg Gisoni in 2013.[7][8] Ziegler began taking ballet lessons at the age of two[9] and joined the Abby Lee Dance Company at age four, where she trained in tap, ballet, lyrical, contemporary, acro and jazz.[6][10] Ziegler has a younger sister, Mackenzie, a singer and dancer who appeared with her on Dance Moms,[11] two older half-brothers from her father's previous marriage, and two older step-siblings from the previous marriage of her stepfather, Greg Gisoni, a vice president at Westinghouse Electric Company.[7]
Ziegler attended Sloan Elementary School in Murrysville, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, until 2013, when she left to be homeschooled.[12] Ziegler was raised in Murrysville,[13] but as a teenager she began to work and spend most of her time in Los Angeles.[14][15]
Career
Dance Moms and music videos
With Abby Lee Dance Company, Ziegler won numerous titles at regional, state and national dance competitions,[6][16] including the 2014 Dancers Choice Award for Favorite Dancer 17 & Under.[17] In 2010, she performed for Paula Abdul's reality television program Live to Dance.[18] In 2011, eight-year-old Ziegler and her mother appeared on the first season of Lifetime's Dance Moms,[19] a reality show about the young dancers on Abby Lee Miller's Abby Lee Dance Company Elite Competition Team and their often quarrelsome mothers.[20][21] Ziegler "emerged as the preternaturally polished standout on six seasons" on the show,[22] where she continued to appear alongside her mother and younger sister, Mackenzie, until 2016, their last season on the show.[23][24] In 2013, she made guest appearances on a spin-off program, Abby's Ultimate Dance Competition.[25] Dance Moms helped to make Ziegler "one of the most famous dancers in the entertainment world currently. ... [She inspires] other dancers to pursue their dreams with originality and grace."[19]
Ziegler has appeared in music videos for such artists as Alexx Calise, Sia and Todrick Hall.[26][27] She gained wide notice, at the age of 11, by starring in the 2014 video for "Chandelier" by Sia, which won the ARIA Music Award for Best Video.[28] Sia discovered Ziegler on Dance Moms.[22] The video also received nominations at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards for Video of the Year and Best Choreography, winning the latter.[29] It was also nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Music Video in 2015.[30] It has received more than 2.5 billion views on YouTube, and at one point it was the 13th most viewed YouTube video of all time.[31] Ziegler said of the choreography: "It ... was really out of the box and it expanded me a lot, because I'm used to competition dances where you're like, Point your legs! But this time it was like, you just need to let go and feel it."[32]
In 2015, Ziegler starred with Shia LaBeouf in "Elastic Heart", another Sia video, which has accumulated more than 1 billion YouTube views.[33] Later that year, Ziegler starred in the music video for "Big Girls Cry" to complete her trilogy of videos from Sia's album 1000 Forms of Fear.[34] She danced to Sia's vocals on several television shows in 2014 and 2015, including The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Dancing with the Stars, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Saturday Night Live, as well as at the Hollywood Bowl.[35][36] By the end of 2015, she had performed with Sia on the Ellen DeGeneres Show three times.[37] She also performed to "Chandelier", alongside Sia and Kristen Wiig, at the 2015 Grammy Awards.[38] The "Chandelier" and "Elastic Heart" videos were both selected as part of PopSugar's 2016 list of "25 of the Best Dance Videos of the Last Decade".[39] In 2016, Ziegler starred in a fourth Sia video, "Cheap Thrills", from the album This Is Acting,[40] in which she "delivers another powerful performance".[41] This was followed by a fifth Sia video, later that year, for "The Greatest".[42][43] Kathleen Hildebrand wrote in Süddeutsche Zeitung that anyone who has seen Ziegler's "iconic" movement will never again return to "boringly ordinary" MTV videos.[44] Ziegler continued the collaboration with Sia and the group LSD in the music videos for "Thunderclouds" (2018) and "No New Friends" (2019).[45][46] She also dances in the 2020 music video for Sia's single, "Together".[47]
Philanthropy
In 2012, Ziegler, along with her mother and sister, partnered with Starlight Children's Foundation to help raise awareness for chronically ill youth.[153][154] In 2016, Ziegler and her sister made a public service announcement for DoSomething.org's Birthday Mail campaign, which enables people to send homemade birthday cards to children living in homeless shelters.[155] The same organization placed the Ziegler sisters on their 2016 list of charitable young celebrities.[156] Ziegler also performed with Travis Wall at Nigel Lythgoe's Dizzy Feet Foundation gala in 2016 to raise funds for dance education programs for low-income children and scholarships for talented students at dance schools in the U.S.[157]
Since 2016, Ziegler has partnered with Dancers Against Cancer, appearing in public service announcements to raise awareness and funding for people battling cancer.[158] She starred in a 2017 ASPCA Public service announcement, set to Sia's song "Puppies Are Forever", to encourage people to adopt shelter and rescue dogs.[159] In 2018, Ziegler teamed up with Sia and MAC Cosmetics, with an ad, choreographed to Sia's song "Helium", for a lipstick with all proceeds to benefit the company's AIDS Fund.[160] She appeared on Celebrity Family Feud on July 7, 2019, together with her sister, mother, aunt and dancer Charlize Glass, playing for "My Friend's Place", where they have volunteered in the past, which provides meals for homeless youth in Los Angeles.[161]
Personal life
From early 2017 to mid-2018, Ziegler dated Australian teenager Jack Kelly,[193] the son of former New York Yankees infielder Pat Kelly.[194] From 2019 to early 2023 she dated singer-songwriter Eddie Benjamin.[195][196]
