Ballet dancer and choreographer Alfredo Corvino, who spent more than four decades on the faculty at Juilliard and whose teaching was an enduring influence on generations of dancers of all styles and in all fields, died on August 2 in Manhattan. He was 89.

Alfredo Corvino teaching a ballet class at Juilliard in 1979. (Photo by Peter Schaaf)

Born on February 2, 1916, in Montevideo, Uruguay (where his father was a violinist in the Philharmonic Orchestra), Corvino showed an early interest in music but soon shifted the focus of his studies to dance, training with Alberto Poujanne as a scholarship student at Uruguay's National Academy of Ballet. He went on to become a principal dancer with the National Ballet Company at the Municipal Theater in Montevideo (as well as a choreographer and assistant ballet master) before he took leave to tour Latin America with Ballets Jooss (whose director, the German-born expressionist Kurt Jooss, choreographed the powerful antiwar ballet The Green Table). Shortly afterward, Corvino joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and toured the U.S. as one of the company's soloists.

After serving in the U.S. Army overseas—where he saw active duty before being transferred to the Special Service and working in musicals of the U.S.O.—Corvino settled in New York and joined the Metropolitan Opera Ballet as a soloist, subsequently becoming the company's ballet master. (He was to teach there for almost 20 years.) Other companies with which he appeared include the Radio City Music Hall Ballet, Dance Players, the Herbert Ross Company, the Gavrilov Company, the Classic Ballet Company of New Jersey, the Dance Circle Company, and Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal, with which he later toured as the company's ballet master. (Bausch had been one of Corvino's early students at Juilliard in the late 1950s and early '60s.)

Corvino was an exponent of the classical ballet style developed by the Italian Enrico Cecchetti, whose method he absorbed while studying with its chief British exponent in New York, Margaret Craske. Over time, Corvino also studied with Anatole Vilzak, Edward Caton, Boris Romanoff, Alexander Gavrilov, and Antony Tudor, the Met Ballet's director, who asked Corvino to join the newly created Dance Division at Juilliard in 1952. Corvino became part of a stellar faculty that included (in addition to Tudor) director Martha Hill, modern dance pioneers José Limón and Martha Graham, and ballet great Hector Zaraspe.

When Corvino retired from the Juilliard faculty in 1995 after 42 years, his daughter Andra took over his ballet classes. Corvino continued to teach master classes in New York after his retirement, and served as a panelist for the New York State Council on the Arts. He received the Martha Hill Award for Leadership in Dance in 2002 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Juilliard in 2003, returning to the School this past May to be among the first recipients of the Juilliard Medal.

Read a tribute to Alfredo Corvino.

Though he made his name in New York City, Corvino taught students worldwide at schools and companies in Germany, Venezuela, Holland, France, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. He also choreographed for the Amato Opera, Princeton Ballet, Maryland Ballet, SUNY-Purchase, Juilliard Opera Theater, Philadelphia Opera Theater, and the New Jersey Dance Theater Guild, which he directed for 10 years.

Corvino's wife, Marcella Rubin (whom he met when she was photographing the Ballet Russe, and who became an administrator for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School) died in 2004. He is survived by the couple's two daughters, both of whom live in New York: ballet teachers Andra, a Juilliard faculty member, and Ernesta, who also directs and choreographs for the Dance Circle. He also has a sister, Margarita Corvino, who lives in Uruguay.