Yevgeny Shlapko was born in Odessa, Ukraine but raised in Brooklyn, New York. He began his ballet training at age 8, with Madame Olga Kostritzky at The School of American Ballet (SAB) in New York City. He spent the next 10 years training under the direction of Peter Boal, Sean Lavery, and Andrei Kramarevsky. At SAB, Mr. Shlapko had the opportunity to work with choreographers including Christopher Wheeldon, Benjamin Millepied, and Justin Peck. In his final years of training, he performed featured roles in Peter Martins’s Les Gentilhommes, as well as Christopher d’Amboise’s Tribute and Benjamin Millepied’s 28 Variations on a Theme by Paganini. In 2007, Mr. Shlapko launched his professional dancing career by joining the Carolina Ballet. He has been featured in Robert Weiss’ Don Quixote, as well as Choreographer Lynne Taylor Corbett’s Carmina Burana. Several roles have been choreographed on him including “Renfield’ in Lynne Taylor Corbett’s Dracula, and the principal couple in Artistic Director Zalman Raffael’s Rachmaninoff: Concerto no. 2.