Women of Main Street: Dixie Elliott

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Dixie Elliott, owner of Carolina Dance Academy, is one of nearly 100 local businesswomen who will be recognized Sept. 23 during Main Street Manning’s annual meeting. The Manning Times will be featuring a few of these women each week throughout September in The Manning Times, and posting stories daily on manninglive.com. Dixie Elliott needed $8,000 to open her dance studio in July 2008. She got $7,999 from her husband’s sale of his late father’s classic Corvette to venture closer to her dreams. “I opened my studio’s first registration with only three students (my daughters),” Elliott said. “I ended up opening the doors at the end of August 2008 to more than 100 students.” The daughter of a telephone engineer, Elliott moved around a lot as a child with her family. When she was 12, she moved to Sumter, where her mother decided she and her brother needed to stay. “She decided we needed the stability of growing up in one location,” Elliott said. “I spent lots of time with friends at the lake, giving me an immediate fondness for Manning. My husband’s family is from Manning, and I knew it would one day make a perfect location to raise a family and eventually start a business.” Elliott started dancing at Miss Libby’s School of Dance at the age of 3. She knew she wanted to be a dance teacher just four years later. “After graduating high school in Sumter, I was hired as a teacher at Miss Libby’s,” she said. She attended Winthrop University as a dance major, and would teach Saturday classes at Miss Libby’s. “While I know that I missed out of a lot of ‘social activities,’ I wouldn’t have had it any other way,” Elliott said. Her dancers have trained with choreographers from throughout the United States through master classes at her studio. They include Lacey Schwimmer, Geo Hubela and Aarron Burr. Recently, her student danced under the direction of “Newsies” choreographer Chris Gatelli on “Mickey’s Merry Christmas Parade” at Disney World, which was televised on ABC. “The students are what make it worth all the late nights, days away from my family and occasional ‘dance mom’ issues,” Elliott said. “They are the ones deserving of all the praise. They take what I give them and turn it into something amazing.” Elliott and her husband, Rob, have four children, Tyler, Baleigh, Aly and Celia.