Ashley is the studio owner and director. She has been dancing since she was just 7 years old. She danced at her local dance studio where she studied ballet, jazz, and lyrical. She competed at various competitions throughout Ottawa, Toronto and Quebec. She has won numerous awards, however her biggest accomplishment was being asked to join the Extreme Team where she performed on the stages at Disney in Florida. Ashley continued her dance training in high school at l'école secondaire publique De La Salle specializing in ballet.
Miss Ashley could not envision life without dance, after graduating from high school she was accepted into the dance program at York University where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance as well as a Bachelor of Arts in English. During her 5 years at York Ashley studied with many reknown dancers such as Jennifer Bolt, Meagan Andrews, Susan Cash, Claire Wootten, Helene Jones, Julisa Sasso, among many more. She studied the human body, kinesiology, dance history, and pedagogy. Once she graduated in 2011, Ashley continued her education at the University of Ottawa in the education program. Since then Ashley has been teaching at her childhood high school, she is the dance teacher for grade 7 & 8 at De La Salle. She has been teaching in the Ottawa area since her return from York in 2011 and opened her very own studio in 2017.
Hi I’m Miss Sammy. I am privileged to be a dance teacher at the Ashley Thomas School of Dance! I started my dance career when I was 4 years old. I started dance classes in Miss Julia’s garage studio where I took one class a week which consisted of ballet, tap, jazz, and baton. I fell in love with ballet and wanted to be a ballerina when I grew up. In addition to my dance class at Miss Julia’s, my mom signed me up for ballet classes. Sadly being a military family we moved my 3rd year of dance. I did 3 years at the Quinte Ballet School and 1 year learning hip hop at the Ireland Dance Academy. We then moved to the Ottawa. This is when I started to take my dance career a bit more seriously at The Studio School of Dance. I started off slowly by taking just competitive ballet. Each year adding a new discipline, competitive jazz, recreational acro, competitive hip hop, competitive contemporary, and lastly competitive tap. Being a competitive dancer was very rewarding and fun. But, for me, there was something special about becoming a dance assistant. I assisted in my 1st little steps class at 14 years old and fell in love with teaching dance. As a senior, I joined KaliAndrews Dance Company to learn silks. My 2nd year at KADC I started to supply teach dance classes and study the BATD syllabus to become a qualified teacher. I received my BATD in Jazz / Modern dance in 2015. Since then I have been teaching dance to all ages from little steps to adult classes and I’m one of the lucky ones that say I love my job!