Toni Bentley was born in Perth, Western Australia to an Australian father, a biologist, and German/British mother, a lawyer. Leaving Perth at age two, she lived in Bristol, England for four years prior to emigrating to the United States. She took her first ballet class at age four in England and then entered the School of American Ballet, the official school of New York City Ballet, at age ten. At seventeen she was invited by George Balanchine to join his New York City Ballet and she danced there for ten years.
She is the author of five New York Times Notable Books.
Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal, was published when she was twenty-two and is a diary of her life as a young dancer in the New York City Ballet during Balanchine's tenure. She went on the write
Holding On to the Air: the Autobiography of Suzanne Farrell
(co-authored with Farrell), Costumes by Karinska, about Balanchine's great Russian costume designer, Sisters of Salome, a cultural history of the femme fatale and origins of modern striptease, and The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir, the story of an obsessive love. The Surrender was named one of the 100 Notable Books of the year by the New York Times, and one of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly. It has been translated into eighteen languages and was a bestseller in numerous countries, including France, Spain, Italy, and Brazil.
She has written essays and reviews for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, BookForum, Vogue, Allure, Time, Newsweek, Arts & Antiques, Smithsonian, Ballet Review, Dance Magazine, CR Fashionbook, and the Daily Beast among others. She has given talks at Harvard University, Cambridge University, the Oscar Wilde Society, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Zimmerli Art Museum, the University of North Florida, the Philoctetes Society, and at THiNK 2013, in Goa, India. In 2010 her story "The Bad Lion," originally published in the The New York Review of Books, was selected for The Best American Essays 2010 by editor Christopher Hitchens.
A one-woman play adaptation of The Surrender starring the Swiss-German actress Isabelle Stoffel, had its world premiere in Madrid produced by the Spanish National Theatre (Centro Dramático Nacional) in January 2013 at the Teatro María Guerrero in Madrid playing in tandem with Federico Garcia Lorca's Yerma. The play had its English-language world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013 followed by a run in New York City at the Clurman Theatre. The play toured in Spain, Germany, Switzerland and South America.
Bentley’s sixth book, Serenade: A Balanchine Story, about George Balanchine’s iconic masterpiece, Serenade, is published in April 2022 by Pantheon Books. She is a Guggenheim Fellow.
