Maddie Ziegler

Madison "Maddie" Nicole Ziegler (born September 30, 2002) is an American dancer, actress and model who achieved wide notice at an early age. She first became known for appearing in Lifetime's reality show Dance Moms from 2011 (at age 8) until 2016. From 2014 to 2016, she gained wider fame for starring in five music videos by Sia, including "Chandelier" and "Elastic Heart", which cumulatively have attracted more than 3 billion views on YouTube. She also has toured with Sia. Ziegler has guest-starred on scripted shows, danced on various TV shows and at concerts, and has been seen on magazine covers and in feature articles. She has modeled for Capezio, Ralph Lauren and Target, among other brands. Ziegler was included by Time magazine on its list of the "30 most influential teens" in each of 2015 and 2016. Ziegler was a judge on the 2016 season of So You Think You Can Dance: The Next Generation and is on tour with Sia in late 2016. She is expected to make her feature film debut in The Book of Henry (2017). Early life Ziegler was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Melissa Ziegler-Gisoni and Kurt Ziegler, who owned a mortgage company. She is of Polish, German and Italian descent. Her parents divorced in 2011, citing the financial and emotional toll that dance took on the family, and her mother married Greg Gisoni in 2013. Ziegler has been an active member of the Abby Lee Dance Company since the age of two. She trains in tap, ballet, lyrical, contemporary, acro, jazz and aerial dance. Ziegler has a younger sister, Mackenzie, a dancer and singer who appeared with her on Dance Moms, two older half-brothers from her father's previous marriage, and two older step-siblings from the previous marriage of her step-father, Greg Gisoni, a vice-president at Westinghouse Electric Company. Ziegler attended Sloan Elementary School until 2013, when she left to be homeschooled. Ziegler and her family have long lived in Murrysville, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, and now split their time between Murrysville and Los Angeles. Career Dance Moms and music videos Ziegler has won numerous titles at regional, state and national dance competitions, including the 2014 Dancers Choice Award for Favorite Dancer 17 & Under. In 2010, Ziegler performed for Paula Abdul's reality television program Live to Dance, but the program was canceled before her performance aired. In 2011, eight-year-old Ziegler and her mother appeared on the first season of Lifetime's Dance Moms, a reality show about the young dancers on Abby Lee Miller's Abby Lee Dance Company Elite Competition Team and their often quarrelsome mothers. Ziegler "emerged as the preternaturally polished standout on six seasons" on the show, where she continued to appear alongside her mother and younger sister, Mackenzie, until 2016, their last season on the show. In 2013, Ziegler made guest appearances on a spin-off program, Abby's Ultimate Dance Competition. 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." Ziegler has appeared in music videos for such artists as Alexx Calise, Sia and Todrick Hall. She gained wide notice, at the age of 11, by starring in the 2014 video for "Chandelier" by Sia, who discovered her on Dance Moms. The video won the ARIA Music Award for Best Video and received nominations at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards for Video of the Year and Best Choreography, winning the latter. It was also nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Music Video in 2015. It has received more than 1.5 billion views on YouTube, and it was, at one point, the 13th most viewed YouTube video of all time. Ziegler said of the choreography: "It was really different and weird for me, because I usually don't, you know, be a crazy person every time. It was so fun to do and 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." In January 2015, Ziegler starred with Shia LaBeouf in "Elastic Heart", another Sia video, which has accumulated more than 700 million YouTube views. The video "courted controversy and plaudits in equal measure", with some commentators perceiving it as having pedophilic undertones due to the relative ages of the dancers. Sia explained that the two dancers represented "warring 'Sia' self states", but she nevertheless apologized on Twitter to anyone who was offended. Later in 2015, Ziegler starred in "Big Girls Cry" to complete her trilogy of videos from Sia's album 1000 Forms of Fear. Since 2014, Ziegler has danced to Sia's vocals on several television shows, including The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Dancing with the Stars, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Saturday Night Live, as well as at the Hollywood Bowl. By the end of 2015, Ziegler had performed with Sia on the Ellen DeGeneres Show three times. She also performed to "Chandelier", alongside Sia and Kristen Wiig, at the 2015 Grammy Awards. 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". In 2016, Ziegler starred in a fourth Sia video, "Cheap Thrills", from the album This Is Acting. A Teen Vogue reviewer wrote that Ziegler "delivers another powerful performance". This was followed by a fifth Sia video, later that year, titled "The Greatest". Reviewing Ziegler's performance, Kathleen Hildebrand wrote in Süddeutsche Zeitung that anyone who has seen Ziegler's "iconic" movement will never again return to "boringly ordinary" MTV videos. Acting In 2012, Ziegler landed her first professional acting job, portraying the character Young Deb on an episode of the Lifetime series Drop Dead Diva. In 2014, Ziegler appeared as a guest star in Episode 34 of HitStreak Summer, a made-for-mobile series. She continued her acting career in 2015 with guest spots on the Disney Channel series Austin & Ally and ABC Family's Pretty Little Liars. In January 2016, she guest starred in the episode "Ballet and the Beasts" on Nickelodeon's Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn. Ziegler voiced the character Camille in the animated film, Ballerina (2016), and is set to appear in a feature film, The Book of Henry (2017). She has also been cast in a film written and to be directed by Sia, titled Sister. Ziegler expects to do more acting. She told Hunger magazine in 2016: "I don’t want to always be seen as a reality TV person. I want people to see that there's more that I can do. ... [T]his year acting is going to be my focus."