The Lineage Romana Kryzanowska Refused to Change
While other Elders adapted, expanded, or reinvented the method, Romana Kryzanowska spent half a century defending a different idea: that Classical Pilates isn't to be touched. Not the order, not the vocabulary, not a single transition.
Of the five Elders with their own profile in this section, Romana Kryzanowska is the only one we’ve already devoted an entire feature to — about the 2000 trial that legally freed the word “Pilates” for anyone to use. But reducing her legacy to that courtroom would be a mistake: long before she ever took the stand, Kryzanowska had already spent decades defending an idea that, within the Elders’ own lineage, not everyone shared.
A student at seventeen, a director at forty-six
She arrived at Joseph Pilates’ studio in 1941, at seventeen, referred by her own ballet teacher, George Balanchine, to treat an ankle injury. By the third lesson, the pain was gone. She stayed. She studied intensively with him until 1944, when she married the Peruvian businessman Pablo Mejía and spent more than a decade in Peru — never once giving up teaching, or her contact with “Uncle Joe” and Clara. She returned to New York in 1958 and went back to the Eighth Avenue studio. After Joseph’s death in 1967, Clara kept the business running for a few more years; in 1970, Kryzanowska formally became director of what was by then called The Pilates Studio.
While others adapted the method to new bodies and new contexts, she argued that the original was already complete — that it didn’t need improving, only faithful transmission.
Orthodoxy as a stance, not an accident
That’s where she differs from Elders like Kathy Grant or Ron Fletcher, who adapted, expanded, or reinvented parts of the method for their own students and contexts. Kryzanowska took the opposite stance, and held it for half a century: the thirty-four-exercise repertoire, in the exact order of the 1945 book, with the exact vocabulary she remembered learning directly from Joseph, unmodified. That strict fidelity is, today, what the industry knows as Classical Pilates — a school within the method, not the whole of it, but probably the one closest to what a 1945 student would recognize without blinking.
A three-generation household
After parting ways with the organization that had inherited the original studio’s commercial name, Kryzanowska founded Romana’s Pilates International alongside her daughter, Sari Mejia Santo, and later her granddaughter, Daria. It’s the only case, within the Elders’ lineage, of direct family transmission across three generations — a fact that fits her own idea of what the method needed: not innovation, but custody. She died in New York on August 30, 2013, at ninety, presumably with the satisfaction of having handed down the legacy exactly as she’d received it.
Field Notes
- 17Romana Kryzanowska's age when she began studying with Joseph Pilates, after an ankle injury.
- 1970Year she became director of The Pilates Studio, following Joseph's death (1967) and Clara's final years at the helm.
- 3Generations of her own family — herself, her daughter Sari, her granddaughter Daria — who taught the method under the Romana's Pilates International banner.