Olivia Taliangis – The Girl Who Never Walked Away
Before Olivia Taliangis (Class of 2022) found confidence in herself, she found it in dance.Â
Olivia remembers the nine-year-old who wondered why the costumes looked different on her. She remembers the fourteen-year-old who wore the boys’ costume because the girls’ one wouldn’t fit her. She remembers the seventeen-year-old who sat in the library during study period and cried because she was falling out of love with the thing she loved most.
She did not walk away. But she was close.
What kept her was not confidence, not reassurance, but something quieter and more stubborn than either of those things. It was a love for the art that would not let her go, even when she was ready to let it go.
Now 22, a WAAPA graduate, performer, choreographer, and dance teacher, Olivia is building a life entirely on her own terms.Â
The Teacher Who Saw What Was There
In Year 12, Olivia told her drama teacher Emily Hunt that she had applied for Arts Management and had received an early offer from Notre Dame. It seemed like a sensible plan. Emily listened, then asked a different question.Â
Had she heard of the Bachelor of Performing Arts?
What followed were months of after-school rehearsals, lunchtime catch-ups, and a drama teacher who told her to stop trying to do it perfectly and start paying attention to the mistakes. That is where the learning was, Emily told Olivia. That is where the performance comes from.
Olivia filmed her audition during WACE. She received a call back at the start of Leavers. Three months later she was sitting in the Geoff Gibbs Theatre with her new classmates at WAAPA.
“If it wasn’t for Emily,” she says, “I would not be the performer or the woman I am today.”
A Special Connection
Behind Olivia’s growth was a meaningful connection that helped her navigate some of her most challenging moments.Â
Rosa Speranza was not just her Dean in Years 10 & 11. By Olivia’s telling, she was also a cheerleader, a confidante, and a source of emergency chocolate during study periods.
She was the kind of person whose laugh echoed down hallways and who would wave through classroom windows mid-test before walking away quickly so the other teacher did not see.
Rosa came to Olivia’s performances. She advocated for extensions when she knew how exhausted Olivia was. When she needed a minute to breathe, Rosa gave her one.
“It was an honour to be one of her students,” Olivia says. “I will forever cherish my memories of her.”
Rosa passed away earlier this year. She is remembered by many in this community with the same depth of feeling that Olivia carries. She knew exactly what these girls needed, often before they did.
Three Years at WAAPA
After graduating from Santa Maria, Olivia took the next step towards turning her passion into a career. She graduated from WAAPA (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts) in 2025, completing the Bachelor of Performing Arts. Those three years, she says, taught her that the things that once consumed her do not define her. She was surrounded by artists who saw her clearly, and that changed something.
She has performed Fringe shows. She is currently rehearsing Enter Coda, a graduate double bill with WAAPA’s dance company LINK, featuring new work by South Korean choreographer Pansun Kim alongside a restaging of Hofesh Shechter’s Grand Finale, performing at the Liberty Theatre at the end of May. She is also completing her thesis, teaching at K2 Dance, and getting home late most nights.
“The hardest thing,” she says, “is remembering that my body is my instrument and that I must take care of it.”
In the Studio, Something Shifts
Teaching has done something unexpected for Olivia. It has been, in her own words, healing.
Being part of a child’s life, not only as a dance teacher but as someone they trust, watching the little girls she once taught now in high school, these things have given her a way of understanding her own story differently.
“I’m able to teach kids about the thing I love most in an environment where they can be unapologetically themselves,” she says. “It is a great privilege.”
She knows what it costs a child to walk into a dance studio and wonder if she belongs there. She knows because she was that child. She also knows what it means to have an adult in the room who believes you before you believe yourself.
That is what she is, now, for someone else.
Between Rehearsals
When she is not in the studio or at her desk finishing her thesis, Olivia reads. She discovered Kevin Kwan before the Crazy Rich Asians film came out and has not looked back. She is currently working through R.F Kuang, whose novels she describes as intellectually crafted in ways that feed her own script writing. She is a committed Fremantle Dockers supporter and attends every game her schedule allows, sitting with her family and, by her own description, screaming like crazy when they win. She also sees her friends whenever their busy calendars allow.
Olivia is building a life shaped by creativity, purpose, and connection.
The girl who once considered walking away now steps confidently into the spotlight, not because the doubts disappeared, but because she finally realised she belonged there all along.
- dance journey, dance teacher and choreographer, Featured, girls school alumni stories, Olivia Taliangis, Performing Arts Education, resilience and belonging, Santa Maria College alumni, Santa Maria Community, student mentorship, WAAPA Graduate
Author: Santa Maria College
Santa Maria College is a vibrant girls school with a growing local presence and reputation. Our Mission is to educate young Mercy women who act with courage and compassion to enrich our world. Santa Maria College is located in Attadale in Western Australia, 16 km from the Perth CBD. We offer a Catholic education for girls in Years 5 – 12 and have 1300 students, including 152 boarders.
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