Malinka, Bella.

Educator, choreographer, and dancer Bella Malinka taught at New York?s School of the Performing Arts from 1949 to 1981.

Little is known of her early life, but Malinka studied ballet with Anton Dolin, Leon Danelian, Bronislava Nijinska, and Edward Caton, among others. She also studied modern dance, theater dance, and ethnic dance with Hanya Holm, Agnes De Mille, Bhupesh Guha, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, and Frederico Rey. As a dancer, Malinka had a varied career. She performed with a number of modern dance companies, danced on the stage in operettas, as well as in vaudeville and nightclubs.

A faculty member at New York City's School of Performing Arts (later Fiorello H. La Guardia High School of Music and Arts) from its inception, Malinka taught there from 1949 to 1981, eventually becoming Senior Ballet Teacher. She developed and taught a ballet survey course to all freshman dance students and choreographed annual student performances, staging the works of Balanchine, as well as creating her own original ballets. Malinka also created works for numerous other special events under the School of Performing Arts' auspices, including the ballet, Union Maid (1979), which was performed to the music of Woody Guthrie for the United Federation of Teachers. Some of her outstanding students included George De la Peña, Eliot Feld, and Christian Holder. In the 1970s, she also was asked by the New York City Board of Education to review standards for licensing dance teacher. Malinka left the School of Performing Arts in 1981, after having filed and won (on appeal) a grievance against Lydia Joel, Chairman of the Dance Department.