Featured Artist | Hip-Hop | Red Bull Dance Your Style
Marlee Hightower: The Child Star Who Became the Owner
She was headlining national tours at eleven and nominated for Teen Choreographer of the Year at thirteen. Most careers that start that early do not survive the transition to adulthood. Hers did, and the reason is the most useful lesson in this profile.
By Dance Mogul Magazine | Featured Artist | September 2026
Hightower off the floor in Tampa — the screen behind her billed the style simply as hip hop | Photo: Chelsea Adams/Red Bull Content Pool
Artist Spotlight
Marlee Hightower is a dancer, choreographer, visual artist and studio owner based in Orlando, Florida. Born in Bakersfield, California in December 1999, she moved to Indianapolis at one and Orlando at four, where she found hip-hop and joined Studio One. In 2010 she was one of eight dancers selected to form Studio One, Young Beast Society, which became the first dance group to reach the top 48 on America’s Got Talent and finished in the top five. She was headlining the World of Dance tour at eleven, signed to Bloc at thirteen, and nominated by World of Dance for Teen Choreographer of the Year in 2013. Her commercial credits include Samsung, Mattel, TJ Maxx, Party City, Motorola and Puma, a cameo in Pharrell Williams’ “Happy,” and dancing with Janet Jackson on the Unbreakable Tour. Her family opened Motiv Dance in 2015; she founded Motiv Crew in 2016 and became co-owner and artistic director of the studio in 2020. She reached the final eight at the 2026 Red Bull Dance Your Style USA National Final.
File // At a Glance
NAME — Marlee Hightower
BORN — Bakersfield, California, December 1999
BASED — Orlando, Florida (since age four)
STYLE — Hip-hop | choreography | freestyle
FIRST CREW — Studio One, Young Beast Society (2010)
MENTOR — The late Kavin Grant, founder of A Rhythm Nation
AGENCY — Bloc, signed 2013
SCREEN & STAGE — America’s Got Talent | NBC’s World of Dance | Janet Jackson’s Unbreakable Tour
OWNS — Motiv Dance Studio, co-owner and artistic director
TAMPA 2026 — Final eight
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3 Age She Started Dancing |
11 Age She Began Headlining |
5 AGT Top-Five Finish |
8 Tampa Final Eight |
The dance industry consumes talented children at a rate nobody likes to discuss. It finds them at eight or nine, puts them on television, sells tickets to watch them do things adults find astonishing in a small body, and then — with remarkable consistency — loses interest somewhere around seventeen, when the astonishment wears off and the child becomes simply a good dancer among thousands of good dancers. The children are rarely told this is coming.
Marlee Hightower had the full version of that childhood. Selected at ten for a crew that became the first dance group ever to reach the top 48 on America’s Got Talent. Top five on the show’s highest-rated season. A freestyle video past a million views. Headlining a national tour at eleven. Signed to a major agency at thirteen, and nominated for Teen Choreographer of the Year the same year. By any measure available to a young dancer, she had already won.
In September 2026, at twenty-six, she reached the final eight of the national freestyle championship. That sentence is the actual subject of this piece — not the childhood, but the fact that the career is still going, at the top level, fifteen years after the part that usually ends them. She did not survive it by being more talented than the other children. She survived it by changing what she was: from a dancer who gets hired to a person who owns the room. That progression is repeatable, and almost nobody shows it to young dancers in time.
Bakersfield, Indianapolis, and Orlando by the Age of Four
She was born in Bakersfield, California in December 1999, moved to Indianapolis at one, and landed in Orlando at four. She had already started dancing by then — at three, in the combination ballet, jazz and tumbling class that is the standard American entry point — but it was Orlando that decided what kind of dancer she would be. That is where she found hip-hop, and where she joined a local team called Studio One.
Understand what that sequence does to a person. She did not discover hip-hop as a teenager looking for an identity. She found it as a small child in Orlando — a 2025 HuffPost piece has her immersed in street dance since the age of six — before she had a self to express, which means the form is not something she adopted. It is closer to a first language.
There is a practical observation buried in the combination-class detail too, and it is worth making because parents ask about it constantly. A ballet, jazz and tumbling foundation at three is not wasted on a dancer who ends up in hip-hop. It builds the alignment, the turnout range and the air awareness that let a body do difficult things safely for decades. Look at the photograph above: she is completely off the floor, braids horizontal, entirely composed. That is twenty-three years of training holding her there.
Young Beast Society, and a Record That Still Stands
In 2010, a coach named Julie Johnson selected eight dancers out of Studio One and formed a crew: Studio One, Young Beast Society. Marlee was one of the eight. She was ten.
What followed was not an ordinary television appearance. Young Beast Society became the first dance group ever to reach the top 48 on America’s Got Talent, and went on to place in the top five during what was the show’s highest-rated season. A dance crew had not gone that far before.
Then came the AGT Live tour, and after it a freestyle video she made to a Jessie J track that passed a million views. In 2013, World of Dance nominated her for Teen Choreographer of the Year. She was thirteen.
Here is the part young dancers should read twice, and it is not the list. It is the word choreographer, arriving at thirteen. Most dancers spend their first decade being moved by other people. She was already making the movement — which means that when the industry eventually stopped needing an astonishing child, she had a second skill that did not depend on being one.
What Usually Happens to Famous Children
Dance Mogul Magazine has watched this cycle for fifteen years and it barely varies.
A child is exceptional. Television finds them. For four or five years they are booked constantly, because a ten-year-old executing adult choreography is a spectacle and spectacle sells. Their whole identity forms around being the youngest person in every room who can do the thing.
Then they turn eighteen, and the thing they were famous for — being young and able — stops being remarkable, because now they are simply able, like everyone else at the audition. The calls slow. Nobody explains why. A great many of them quit around then, and the reason is almost never talent. It is that their entire professional value had been attached to an attribute that expires on a schedule.
Note the sequencing in what Marlee did instead, because it is the whole answer. She did not wait for the calls to slow and then scramble. By fifteen, her family had opened a studio. By sixteen she had founded her own crew. By twenty she was co-owner and artistic director of the business. The transition out of child performance was under way years before the market forced it.
Know the Business: What Owning a Studio Actually Changes
A working dancer sells hours. However good you are, you are paid for the days you are physically in a rehearsal room or on a set, and that income stops the moment you are injured, unavailable, or out of fashion. It does not compound. A studio is a different kind of asset: it earns whether or not the owner is in the building, it employs other dancers, it builds a local reputation that survives any single career, and it can be sold or passed on.
Why a young dancer should care now rather than later: the leverage to build something only exists while you are visible. A dancer with a television credit and a touring profile can fill a class, attract staff and be taken seriously by a landlord. Ten years after the visibility fades, the same person with the same skill finds all three much harder. The time to build the thing that outlasts the career is during the career, not after it.
The Credits — and What Commercial Work Actually Teaches
Signed to Bloc in 2013, she worked national campaigns for Samsung, Mattel, TJ Maxx, Party City, Motorola and Puma. She appears in Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” and danced with Janet Jackson on the Unbreakable Tour. By eleven she was headlining the World of Dance tour and teaching workshops nationally.
A credit list is not an impact statement, so let us be precise about what that particular mix of work builds in a dancer.
Commercials teach repeatability. A national spot means doing an identical eight counts forty times while a director adjusts a light. It is the least romantic work in dance and the most professionalizing, because it replaces inspiration with reliability. Talent opens the door once. Reliability is what gets you called back.
A stadium tour teaches scale. Dancing behind Janet Jackson in an arena is a completely different technical problem from dancing to camera — the movement has to read to someone two hundred feet away with no close-up coming to rescue it.
Teaching workshops at eleven teaches articulation. You cannot teach a step you have only felt. Being made to explain movement to a room, that young, forces a dancer to understand her own body in words — which is exactly the skill a choreographer and later a studio director lives on.
Kavin Grant, and the Teacher Who Does Not Get to See It
Red Bull’s own feature on Florida’s dancers names Marlee’s mentor: the late Kavin Grant, founder of A Rhythm Nation. That name deserves more than a passing mention, so we looked into it.
Kavin Grant was born in 1981 and died in a car accident in 2019, at thirty-seven. He held an MFA in dance from Temple University, joined the faculty of Alabama State University in 2013 and was one of the founding professors of its BFA in dance. He guest-taught at West Chester, Temple, Penn State, the University of the Arts, Akron, Rowan, Muhlenberg and Jackson State. He worked across classical ballet, contemporary ballet, contemporary modern, hip-hop, jazz, African, musical theatre and step. And in Florida, he founded and directed A Rhythm Nation.
Here is why this matters beyond one dancer’s biography. Red Bull’s feature names Grant as mentor to Marlee Hightower — and also to Amari Marshall, the Jacksonville dancer who went on to become a co-dance captain of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour.
Sit with that for a second. One Florida teacher, dead at thirty-seven, whose students include a dance captain on one of the largest tours in the history of live music and a finalist at the national freestyle championship. He did not live to see either of those things arrive at their full size.
This publication exists in large part to make sure that sentence gets written down somewhere. The chain of authorship in dance runs backwards through teachers, and teachers are the first people erased from it — they have no credits, no residuals and no entry in a database. If nobody reports the name, the name goes.
The chain of authorship in dance runs backwards through teachers, and teachers are the first people erased from it. If nobody writes the name down, the name goes.
Motiv: The Year the Career Changed Shape
In 2015 Marlee’s family opened Motiv Dance, described as Orlando’s first open-class hip-hop and choreography studio. She was fifteen.
The phrase “open-class” is doing quiet work there. A conventional competition studio sells a multi-year programme to enrolled families. An open-class studio sells a single class to whoever walks in — which lowers the barrier for the exact people street dance comes from, and which, in Orlando in 2015, apparently did not exist yet.
In 2016 she founded Motiv Crew, co-directing with Dario Boatner. In 2018 the crew appeared on NBC’s World of Dance — the same franchise that had nominated her as a teenager, now returned to as a director rather than a prodigy. By 2020 she was co-owner and artistic director of the studio.
Read that arc as a career path and the shape is unmistakable. Performer at ten. Choreographer at thirteen. Crew director at sixteen. Owner at twenty. Each step moved her further from selling her own hours and closer to owning the structure other people’s hours run through. Almost no dancer is shown that ladder exists.
There is one more thing worth recording, because it is rarer in this industry than it should be. In 2019 she began making visual art, describing it as a therapeutic practice — a way to process what dance could not hold. A dancer who has been working professionally since childhood, deliberately building an outlet that has nothing to do with being watched, is doing something healthy that the industry almost never models.
Tampa: Fifteen Years In, Still in the Final Eight
The 2026 Red Bull Dance Your Style USA National Final took place at the Tampa Convention Center on September 19, 2026. Marlee reached the final eight. The screen behind her billed the style with one word: hip hop. The full bracket is in our Red Bull Dance Your Style Newsroom, and the champion’s story is in our JREAMZ profile.
Tampa was not her first national final. Red Bull’s June 2025 interview with her described her as a wild-card invite to that year’s final in San Francisco, where SonLam won the title over Sean Lew. Footage from stance shows her battles there against T-Wave and against Lew; the second is below. Red Bull also featured her, alongside David “The Crown” Stalter Jr., in a video titled Why I Dance.
Hightower vs Sean Lew at the 2025 USA National Final in San Francisco. Lew went on to finish runner-up | Video: stance/YouTube
Consider what a studio owner is doing in that bracket at all. She is not a full-time competitor. She runs a business, directs a crew and teaches. Entering a crowd-voted national freestyle championship against people whose entire year is built around battling is, professionally speaking, an unnecessary risk. Losing in public does a studio owner no favours.
She entered anyway, and went further than eight of the sixteen. Florida’s presence in the late stages ran deep — Marlee from Orlando, Kidd The Monster with Pompano Beach roots, and Tyler D. Creator out of St. Petersburg, all in the final eight at an event Florida was hosting.
Here is what her result actually demonstrates, and it is the most encouraging thing in this profile for anyone past their early twenties: moving into ownership did not cost her the dancing. The common assumption is that you choose — you either stay on the floor or you go run something. At twenty-six, fifteen years into a professional career, she was still good enough to make the last eight in the country.
The Awards — and the Ones That Don’t Exist Yet
2010 — America’s Got Talent, top five. With Studio One, Young Beast Society, the first dance group to reach the show’s top 48, in its highest-rated season.
2013 — World of Dance, Teen Choreographer of the Year nominee. At thirteen.
2018 — NBC’s World of Dance, Season 3. With Motiv Crew, as co-director.
2025 — Wild-card invite, Red Bull Dance Your Style USA National Final. San Francisco, August 23.
2026 — Final eight, Red Bull Dance Your Style USA National Final. Tampa Convention Center, September 19.
Here is the honest part, and Dance Mogul Magazine would rather print it than pad a page: there is no comprehensive, publicly maintained record of Marlee Hightower’s full working history. Not because the work was not honored, but because the industry has never built the infrastructure to track dance credit properly. Commercial campaigns list the brand and the agency, rarely the dancers. Tour programmes name the headliner. A decade of workshops taught in a decade of cities leaves no trace at all.
That absence is not a footnote to her story. It is the argument. When a discipline is undercredited, its practitioners’ achievements have to be documented deliberately, by publications willing to do it — and the same is doubly true of the teachers behind them, which is why Kavin Grant’s name appears in this article at length rather than in a clause. It is why The Legacy exists on this site.
Where Marlee Hightower Is Now
As of late September 2026 she is co-owner and artistic director of Motiv Dance Studio in Orlando, directs Motiv Crew, and is coming off a final-eight finish at the USA National Final. She continues to work as a choreographer and a visual artist.
Beyond that, we are not going to invent a schedule for her. Public reporting on the rest of her 2026 slate is thin, which is entirely normal for working choreographers and studio directors whose bookings are not announced. When there is verified news, this publication will report it.
What we will say is that Dance Mogul Magazine intends to keep following her and the rest of the Tampa field through the next twelve months. A championship is a night. A career is a decade — and hers is already fifteen years long, which is the part worth paying attention to.
Career Timeline
DECEMBER 1999Born in Bakersfield, California. Moves to Indianapolis at one, Orlando at four.
EARLY CHILDHOODBegins in a combination ballet, jazz and tumbling class at three. Moves to Orlando at four, where she finds hip-hop and joins Studio One.
2010Selected by coach Julie Johnson as one of eight to form Studio One, Young Beast Society. The crew becomes the first dance group to reach the top 48 on America’s Got Talent and finishes top five.
AGE 11Begins headlining the World of Dance tour and teaching workshops nationwide. A freestyle video passes a million views.
2013Signs with Bloc. Nominated by World of Dance for Teen Choreographer of the Year. Commercial work follows for Samsung, Mattel, TJ Maxx, Party City, Motorola and Puma.
2015Her family opens Motiv Dance, Orlando’s first open-class hip-hop and choreography studio.
2016–2018Founds Motiv Crew, co-directing with Dario Boatner. The crew appears on NBC’s World of Dance Season 3.
2019–2020Begins a visual art practice. Becomes co-owner and artistic director of Motiv Dance Studio. Her mentor Kavin Grant dies in 2019.
AUGUST 23, 2025Competes at the Red Bull Dance Your Style USA National Final in San Francisco as a wild-card invite.
SEPTEMBER 19, 2026Reaches the final eight at the Red Bull Dance Your Style USA National Final in Tampa.
What She Represents to Young, Up-and-Coming Dancers
The pattern Marlee Hightower broke is the one where an exceptional child is used until the exceptional part expires, and then quietly released. She converted the visibility into ownership while she still had it.
Read as a career path rather than a résumé, her trajectory shows five distinct stages, and any serious dancer can locate herself on this ladder — which is the whole reason we are laying it out.
1. Take the foundation, even if it is not your style
Ballet, jazz and tumbling at three, hip-hop soon after. The early technical training is not a detour from street dance; it is the reason a body can still do difficult things safely at twenty-six. Take the boring class. It buys you the second half of your career.
2. Learn to make the movement, not only to do it
She was a nominated choreographer at thirteen. Dancing is a skill the market eventually finds cheaper elsewhere; choreographing is a skill that appreciates. Start making work long before anyone asks you to.
3. Take the unglamorous commercial work seriously
Brand campaigns and national spots teach repeatability, professionalism and how a set actually runs. Dancers who dismiss that work as beneath their artistry tend to have shorter careers than dancers who treat it as paid training.
4. Build the asset while you are still visible
The studio opened when she was fifteen and her profile was at its peak. That is the correct order, and it is the stage most careers miss. Visibility is leverage with an expiry date — spend it on something that keeps earning after it fades.
5. Turn access into a door for other people
The final stage is the one most careers never reach: using your position to teach, hire, platform and mentor. An open-class studio in a city that did not have one, a crew she directs, and a room where Orlando dancers can walk in off the street — that is what a career looks like when it stops being about you. If you are building the discipline behind a plan like the one mapped above, our workbooks were built for exactly that.
Why Marlee Hightower Matters to Dance Mogul Magazine
Dance Mogul Magazine has published for over fifteen years on a single conviction: dance is the foundation, not the ceiling. Marlee Hightower is close to a literal demonstration of it. The dancing was never the ceiling — it was the thing that made a studio possible, which made a crew possible, which made a room in Orlando where other people’s children now learn. Move that pattern out of dance entirely and it is the most valuable career advice anyone can receive: build the thing that outlives the version of you the market is currently buying.
The movement vocabulary that drives mainstream entertainment is overwhelmingly born in Black communities, in club culture, in street dance and hip-hop, and is then absorbed upward into pop, film and television — frequently without credit traveling with it. Her career sits directly on that seam: the same body that appears in a Pharrell video and behind Janet Jackson also teaches open classes in Orlando. As a father and son Black owned dance publication, documenting that chain of authorship is not a side project for us. It is the work — and it is why Kavin Grant is named here at length.
If her story lands with you, keep going: explore the full range of forms in our Dance Styles Hub, read our hip-hop coverage, study the artists shaping the commercial industry in Black Creative Directors & Choreographers, and build your foundation in the Dance Knowledge Hub.
Frequently Asked Questions About Marlee Hightower
Who is Marlee Hightower?
Marlee Hightower is a hip-hop dancer, choreographer, visual artist and studio owner based in Orlando, Florida. She is co-owner and artistic director of Motiv Dance Studio, founded Motiv Crew, and reached the final eight at the 2026 Red Bull Dance Your Style USA National Final in Tampa.
How old is Marlee Hightower and where is she from?
She was born in Bakersfield, California in December 1999, making her twenty-six at the time of the 2026 national final. She moved to Indianapolis at one and to Orlando at four, and is based in Orlando.
What was Studio One, Young Beast Society?
A crew of eight dancers formed in 2010 by coach Julie Johnson out of Orlando’s Studio One, with Marlee among them. It became the first dance group to reach the top 48 on America’s Got Talent and finished in the top five during the show’s highest-rated season.
What are Marlee Hightower’s biggest credits?
National campaigns for Samsung, Mattel, TJ Maxx, Party City, Motorola and Puma; an appearance in Pharrell Williams’ “Happy”; dancing with Janet Jackson on the Unbreakable Tour; headlining the World of Dance tour from age eleven; and appearing on NBC’s World of Dance Season 3 with Motiv Crew.
What is Motiv Dance Studio?
Motiv Dance opened in Orlando in 2015, described as the city’s first open-class hip-hop and choreography studio. Marlee founded Motiv Crew in 2016 with co-director Dario Boatner and became co-owner and artistic director of the studio in 2020.
Who was Marlee Hightower’s mentor?
Kavin Grant, founder and director of A Rhythm Nation in Florida, who died in 2019 at thirty-seven. He held an MFA from Temple University and was a founding professor of the BFA in dance at Alabama State University. Red Bull’s feature on Florida dancers names him as mentor to both Marlee Hightower and Amari Marshall, later a co-dance captain on Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour.
How did Marlee Hightower do at Red Bull Dance Your Style 2026?
She reached the final eight at the USA National Final in Tampa on September 19, 2026, in a bracket won by JREAMZ. A year earlier she competed at the 2025 national final in San Francisco as a wild-card invite.
Keep Exploring
Dance Mogul Magazine documents the artists who build the culture and the careers that grow out of it. Start with the Featured Artist series, dig into the Archive, follow the season in the Red Bull Dance Your Style Newsroom, and browse everything we have published in the Article Library.
Reporting sources: Marlee Hightower’s own published biography, Red Bull’s Florida dancers feature and 2026 National Final recap, and The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education for the life of Kavin Grant. Career details reflect verified public reporting as of September 2026. Where the public record is incomplete, this article says so rather than filling the gap.
Marlee Hightower Motiv Dance Hip-Hop Orlando Dance Red Bull Dance Your Style Young Beast Society America’s Got Talent World of Dance Kavin Grant Women in Dance Featured Artist Tampa 2026
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