Tiffany Henderson

Co-Founder & CEO, Twinkle Star Dance Academy™, Twinkle Star Dance™
Co-Owner & Director, Tiffany's Dance Academy™; Founder, Raising the Barre™

Tiffany Henderson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Twinkle Star Dance Academy, a national children's dance franchise, and the co-owner of Tiffany's Dance Academy. She is also the creator of the Twinkle Star Dance curriculum and the lead author of peer-reviewed research on dance and children's mood, published in 2026 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. What began as one young girl's love of the studio has grown into a brand, a curriculum, and a body of published science.

Born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1973, Tiffany has had a rich and exciting career as a professional jazz dancer. In 1992 she was awarded a one-year scholarship to the renowned Tremaine Dance Center in Hollywood, and at the completion of her scholarship she performed as the Tremaine Scholarship Show Featured Dancer. She continued her studies at the prestigious School of Dance at the University of Arizona, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B.F.A. in Dance in 1997. Her career highlights include performances with Quinn/Williams Jazz at the 1995 Jazz Dance World Congress in Nagoya, Japan; the 1996 Jazz Dance World Congress at Washington's Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; the opening of the International Theatre School in Amsterdam in 1997; and performances at Symphony Hall in Phoenix. She was a member of Zohar Dance Company, performed in industrial shows including the Microsoft Global Summit and American Greetings, and was a soloist with La JAZDANZ of Louisiana, a company she was instrumental in bringing to the Amador Theatre in Pleasanton in 2002.

Tiffany has loved dance since she was eight years old. Her first exposure came at Carol Dunn's Dance Studio, which began as a converted room in Miss Dunn's house, right next door to Tiffany's own. As a young girl, Tiffany would climb onto an old wooden picnic table in her backyard and peek over the fence at the classes. Eventually her father bought her a pair of tap shoes so she could tap along with the class from the table. Finally her folks let her join, and the rest is history.

That love became a lifelong mission. Tiffany built Tiffany's Dance Academy into a thriving community of dancers and families, and then grew the concept into Twinkle Star Dance Academy, a national franchise that brings the same joyful, non-competitive approach to studios across the country.

Wanting to understand more deeply why dance matters so much to children, Tiffany earned her Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2025. Her studies became the foundation for her work with Raising the Barre, the organization behind Dance Positive, the measurement program she created to study how children feel before and after class. That work led to a peer-reviewed study, published in 2026 in Frontiers in Psychology, which followed 256 children and adolescents and found that their mood was maintained or improved after the large majority of their classes. It is among the first published research of its kind in children's dance.

In 2026, the brand she co-founded was honored with the Franchise Innovation Award for Most Innovative Use of Data from Franchise Update Media and the International Franchise Association, recognizing exactly this commitment to measuring and understanding what happens in the studio.

Through every chapter, from professional stages to published research, Tiffany's goal has stayed the same: to provide professional, joyful training in every discipline of dance, and to build communities where children are encouraged, never ranked.