The dance studio at 2019 Bunker Hill Road NE looks quiet from the outside. Its curtained front is part of a small commercial strip where, on Saturday afternoons, the only bustle comes from neighbors mowing their lawns and washing their cars. But put your ear closer to the studio door, and you may hear some surprising sounds: the patter of little feet on wood floors, girlish laughter, tunes from a Gilbert and Sullivan LP and the commanding voice of Therrell Smith.

“Tondu,” Smith is directing her weekly class of young ballet students, “Tondu! You don’t know what a tondu is? Go sit down.”

Smith is demonstrating a barre exercise for the four adolescent girls who comprise this class. They watch her – their expressions of admiration mixed with a tinge of trepidation that they might not get the movements right. But for their 90-year-old teacher, to be outfitted in a sky blue leotard and pink ballet slippers and dancing before a crowd of eager faces is to be right at home.

Smith hasn’t wasted a day of her 90 years. Born in the District and living in the same Logan Circle home her parents moved to in 1930, Smith has earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology, graduated from the New York Institute of Photography, founded a dance school and started an arts foundation. Her love of ballet has been threaded through all of these accomplishments.

“I just evidently loved dancing,” says Smith about her first encounter with ballet. She began dancing at 8 years old, under the tutelage of a Howard University doctor’s wife. “I love what it does to your body. It strengthens you. It makes you appreciate your body. I still look good in my leotard! It gives you grace, it gives you poise, it gives you dignity.”

Smith danced in school theater productions and community performances through her high school years, and after attending college in Nashville, she returned to the District to find herself in the role of ballet teacher, instructing students of her sister’s LeDroit Park nursery school. In 1948 Smith’s father, a physician, provided her with the building on Rhode Island Avenue NW that would become the Therrell Smith School of Dance. That year the school put on its first recital, with eight students in attendance. This year the school, now located at the Bunker Hill Road address, will celebrate its 60th anniversary.

At 90 years old, Smith still exhibits the grace and athleticism of a dancer, as well as the vigorous spirit of a woman who has pursued her passions through the barriers and hurdles of injustice.

“It wasn’t easy,” is how Smith describes living in an era of formal segregation and blatant racism. “It wasn’t easy at all. You were really deprived of God’s gift, of what you could be doing, of developing who you are. You can’t develop because you have so many obstacles standing in your way.”

Smith did her best to develop her gift for dance in spite of the obstacles of segregation. But even after studying for five years at the Ballet Arts School at Carnegie Hall in New York and for one year in Paris under the Russian “ballerina absoluta,” Matilda Kshesinskaya, Smith knew that she wouldn’t be accepted to perform with the country’s premier companies because of her race.

“I would have loved to have danced [professionally],” she explains, “but I didn’t expose myself to that. You didn’t even think about that, because you knew they weren’t going to accept you. You went your way and made your life without. Because otherwise there was no need of being hurt.”

Smith has seen that reality change. She has taught thousands of students, among them Virginia Johnson – former prima ballerina with the Dance Theater of Harlem and editor of “Pointe” magazine. But she is still invested in exposing youth to art forms they might not otherwise experience. In 1974 she founded the Thomas and Birdie C. Smith Arts Foundation to acquaint young people with the arts and to encourage existing artists in the pursuit of their crafts. She also gives ballet lessons in the city’s public schools, an activity she says has improved students’ discipline and taught them a thing or two about respecting their elders.

“I go to dance class,” she says, explaining what has enlivened her for six decades of Saturdays in her studio. “And that’s what keeps me going: to teach children. Children are my lifeline. There’s lots of love there, and love is very sustaining. It has sustained me.”

To learn more about the Therrell Smith School of Dance or the Thomas and Birdie C. Smith Arts Foundation, or to be involved in the Therrell Smith School of Dance’s 60th anniversary celebration, call 202-526-1181.