Devin Pullins took dancing classes at Stairway of the Stars on and off since the age of four. During his sophomore year at Proviso East high school in Maywood, Ill. he was looking for a change. An ad in the Maywood Herald reignited Devin Pullins’ his commitment to the art of dance.

“I saw an ad for the Illinois Summer School for the Arts. And I said, ‘I don’t know what this is, but let me just try,’” Pullins said. He applied, auditioned and was accepted to the summer program on a scholarship.

During the summer program a faculty member from the Chicago Academy of the Arts noticed him. He was encouraged to audition for the school in downtown Chicago and was accepted.

“Dance has given me everything I have right now,” Pullins said. “Being able to travel and see different places. Some people never leave out of the state, I’ve been out of my state and out of the country.”

“I’m not rich, but I’m fulfilled in other ways,” he said.

Pullins, a Maywood native, now lives in the Borough of Brooklyn in New York. He travels the world as a freelance choreographer, teacher, and dancer, and also speaks Russian and Spanish.

“I do everything…I’ve been in the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago, then I was in Donald Byrd (a modern dance group out of New York), I teach hip hop, I can teach jazz, I’ve taught ballet. It just depends on what people need me to do,” Pullins said.

Although he has worked with several acts in hip-hop and pop, such as Destiny’s Child and Sean “P-Diddy” Combs, Pullins makes it known he is trained in the classics.

As a young black male dancer people have made assumptions about his abilities and think his skills are limited to hip-hop, Pullins said.

“They assume you can’t do ballet and that’s why I love to do ballet,” Pullins said.

He credits Stairway with introducing him to all the different forms of dance. The structure, building skills through classes, learning different types of dance all began with Stairway, he said.

As a freelancer Pullins travels constantly which is sometimes a source of irritation, but never wakes up and hates his job.

“There are days when I wake up and I don’t want to dance, because I’m tired, or my body hurts, but I never wake up and go to class thinking ‘I hate this, why am I doing this’?” Pullins said.

“A lot of people wake up everyday and go to the computer and hate their jobs. I could go and get an (office) job, but what is the trade off? I’d rather be happy and doing what I love, then going sitting at a desk just to make money.”

Pullins advises aspiring dancers to get comfortable with rejection, but not to internalize it.

 “For every one job you get, you don’t get about a thousand, but don’t worry because what one person doesn’t like, somebody will,” he said. “And the other thing is to work hard. Especially if you’re a black kid, you have to work 3,000 times harder.”