Who is Hannah Neeleman and what’s the Ballerina Farm controversy?

If the name Hannah Neeleman doesn’t ring any bells for you, then maybe Ballerina Farm, the handles that she posts under on social media, does.

Neeleman was the subject of a recent article in The Sunday Times, which labelled her the ‘Queen of the Trad Wives’, and which has gone viral this week after it gave an insight into what her life is really like on their farm.

To her 9.1 million Instagram followers and her 7.6 million TikTok fans, Neeleman appears to be the picture perfect housewife, or traditional wife, as the trend goes.

She spends her days baking cookies, making sourdough bread with freshly laid hen eggs, and tending to her eight children. The 34-year-old is also married to Daniel Neeleman, 35, the heir to the US airline JetBlue fortune.

Why has an interview with Ballerina Farm gone viral?

During the interview with The Times, the interviewer noted that Daniel hardly left Neeleman’s side despite Neeleman being the subject of the interview, and some things were said that have caught readers’ attention.

“My goal was New York City. I left home at 17 and I was so excited to get there, I just loved that energy. And I was going to be a ballerina. I was a good ballerina,” she said. Neeleman had been training as a ballerina at Juilliard school in New York City when she met Daniel. “But I knew that when I started to have kids my life would start to look different.”

“I gave up dance, which was hard. You give up a piece of yourself. And Daniel gave up his career ambitions,” Neeleman says of the sacrifices the pair made to start a family.

The writer, Megan Agnew, then notes: “I look out at the vastness and don’t totally agree. Daniel wanted to live in the great western wilds, so they did; he wanted to farm, so they do; he likes date nights once a week, so they go (they have a babysitter on those evenings); he didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any. The only space earmarked to be Neeleman’s own — a small barn she wanted to convert into a ballet studio — ended up becoming the kids’ schoolroom.”