A professional dancer and the owner of a modeling agency, Chelsea Cushing knows how to put her best face forward, so it’s ironic that the Great Falls resident’s most public appearances have happened behind face- and body-concealing CGI and motion-capture technology.
The white-blond Cushing donned a custom sensor-covered suit that transformed her into Candy, a sweets-themed creature on Dance Monsters, an eight-episode Netflix show that debuted in December.
“I always like to describe it as if Masked Singer had a baby with Avatar,” Cushing, 37, says. “It’s a way for us to project ourselves without people knowing who we are and be judged based off of our dancing instead of how we look.”
For three months in late 2021, she competed in London against 14 other disguised contestants for a $250,000 prize and made it to the quarterfinals.
Contestants on the celebrity-judged show are people with compelling stories, and Cushing has an inspiring one as well.
After the Centreville native graduated from Westfield High School in 2004, she moved to New York and studied dance at the Broadway Dance Center. Until then, her only dance experience came from a high school Glee-style club.
Soon after, the choreographer for a national tour with hip-hop band The Roots hired her. “That was my first big, big break into the industry. It was what really made me fall in love with the commercial side of dance,” Cushing says.
She quickly added other stars to her résumé — Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, and LL Cool J — and worked with Cirque du Soleil before returning to NoVA in 2009 to work at Vienna’s Adrenaline Dance Studio, where she started her own program called AF Dance for budding professional dancers. She also taught hip-hop and contemporary dance nationally and internationally.
But extreme lethargy consumed her in 2014. A blood test revealed she has polycythemia vera, a rare blood cancer that causes bone marrow to make too many red blood cells, which can lead to clots.
“I almost lost my life to it in October of 2018,” Cushing says. Doctors recommended transplanting six organs at once. Because her main problem involved a vein into only one organ (her liver), she opted against the operation. “I am more interested in quality of life.”
Today, she manages the disease with daily anticoagulant injections, monthly blood withdrawals, and yearly esophageal varices bandings on veins prone to bleeding. “I feel healthy today,” she says.
Cushing started AF Talent Management to train model hopefuls when full-time dancing became too demanding. She says while the move sounds like a “jump from the dance stuff,” the skill sets involving hair, makeup, and costumes easily transferred to modeling and fashion.
AFTM now represents more than 120 models. It hosts the twice-yearly AF Fashion Collab, which brings together models, photographers, and hair and makeup artists to create look books models present to agencies. The goal, she says, is to make this region a fashion destination. “I want to expand this opportunity for local talent to really get exposed to the industry and be picked from being here, versus having to go to New York or L.A. or overseas in order to really have a successful, fruitful career,” she says. “It’s really about shedding light on the exorbitant amount of talent and creativity that the culture of the DMV brings.”
But Cushing still teaches hip-hop classes at the Anthem Row Equinox in DC on Mondays and Cerdafied Dance Studios in Alexandria on Tuesdays. So dancing is still very much part of her life — and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
This story originally ran in our March issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine.
