- - 'Dance Moms' got Nia Sioux's story all wrong. She's setting the record straight.

Kelsey WeekmanNovember 5, 2025 at 1:11 AM

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A handful of girls gather around in a mirrored room. Their eyes are lined with harsh makeup and their hair is yanked back in tight buns as their mothers look on from the sidelines. A loud, larger-than-life woman draped in black reveals photos of them hanging on the mirror in the shape of a pyramid, dishing out insults to those at the bottom and praise to those at the top.

This was a common ritual on the reality TV show Dance Moms, and for Nia Sioux, being on the lower level and the subject of constant criticism from the brutal dance instructor, Abby Lee Miller, was a frequent occurrence. So much so, she named her new memoir Bottom of the Pyramid.

“The bottom was the last place anyone wanted to be,” Sioux, now 24, writes in her book. “ And the bottom was where I found myself, week after week, season after season, no matter how hard I worked.”

Ultimately, it didn’t matter how hard she worked or how much she improved. The show, known for creating viral moments with a rage-filled Miller mercilessly screaming at tearful little girls, ran for eight seasons between 2011 and 2019. Sioux, who was between the ages of 10 and 16 when the show aired and often the only Black girl in the room, was there for seven of them.

“It was my whole life,” she tells Yahoo. “I was known as being at the bottom … That was my title, and it honestly still is to this day. I’m turning it around, showing my side of things.”

As soon as the show ended, Sioux wished she could have exposed the depth of racism and verbal harassment she endured, but she was too “upset and angry” back then — and still a child. She needed time to process. As a dancer obsessed with timing, she knows her moment has come.

“I feel like people are going to be receptive to it … because we talk about race-related things now. It’s more common,” she says. “There’s so much happening right now [in the world] and having representation — having diverse books is really important.”

Dance Moms is having a bit of a renaissance in pop culture. TikTokers and YouTubers share clips of Miller’s explosive outbursts, sometimes considering her cruelty, and other times lauding her as an icon. She’s been immortalized as a meme countless times.

In her book, Sioux, still a performer and now a social media personality with 9 million TikTok followers, writes that she understands why Dance Moms is such a cultural fascination. Viewers today are rewatching it for fun but also looking at the show more critically. It’s an opportunity to discuss equity, privilege, stereotypes, bullying and power.

She didn’t watch the show when it was airing — she was working all the time, and tells Yahoo she didn’t see the need to dwell in the past because she “already lived it.” When she now revisits old episodes, both to jog her memory for the book and when clips pop up on her social media feed, she’s infuriated when she sees a moment heavily edited to portray something different from the reality she remembers so vividly.

As an adult, she found it particularly hard to watch scenes of her younger self being berated and crying. She’s comforted by supporters who tell her they can’t watch the show anymore because the cruelty makes it so hard to watch.

“Even with everything not being shown, people can still pick up on the microaggressions and the toxic environment,” Sioux says.

Time and time again on the show, something horrible would happen to Sioux: She’d receive harsh criticism from Miller on how her hair or body looked different from the other girls. She’d be told that she was a bad dancer, yet kept around to try and fail week after week. She writes that she felt “genuinely afraid” as she walked into dance class, her heart racing as she held her breath and hoped Miller wouldn’t be waiting by the door. These confrontations today read as obviously racially charged, but back then, the constant barrage of insults made Sioux feel alienated from the girls around her, most of whom failed to support her through her lowest moments.

But she never quit. She survived 200 episodes, nearly the entire show (not counting season 8, which featured a fresh cast and Miller’s return after serving several months in prison for bankruptcy fraud). Fans often ask her why she did that.

“The fact that I knew I wasn’t wanted on the team only made me push harder. I needed to prove I was — am — good enough,” she writes. “That I would stick to my commitments and come out stronger, no matter what.”

Sioux had been a part of Abby Lee Dance Company (ALDC) in Pittsburgh, Penn., since she was three years old — long before the show began. She wasn’t there to be famous, though she did love being in the spotlight. She wanted to perform and to prove that she was good enough.

When the show began, Sioux’s technical skills had fallen behind her peers as she dealt with a neurological condition called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), which left her in severe and debilitating pain. But once the title of “bad dancer” was bestowed upon her, she was unable to escape it for the entire run of the show.

“The narrative that I was a bad dancer was reiterated so much, it stayed with me throughout the entire show, where I had … the most growth as a dancer,” she says. “I will defend myself every time. I was not a bad dancer … it saddens me that people label me as that. I still see videos to this day.”

Nia Sioux's memoir, "Bottom of the Pyramid." (Harper Horizon) (Harper Horizon)

Sometimes the cruelest moments were cut from the show, but she remembers them. Some of her earliest memories are recoiling from Miller in fear, worrying about what she’d be scolded for next.

Miller, in all her bombastic glory, was the show’s moneymaker, the generator of all those viral moments — she was cartoonishly over-the-top, like the stepmother in a Disney movie. The network brought in professionals to help the dancers learn to cope with Miller, rather than teaching her “how to be a better person,” Sioux writes.

Moms and girls feared her rage and her power to cut them from important performances and make them look bad on the show. When Sioux mentions the ways the famous dancers of the show let her down, like Maddie Ziegler and Jojo Siwa, it’s with empathy and grace. They were just kids.

Sioux says she felt down by the adults most of all. She didn’t even want to mention Miller by name in our interview, but it’s undeniable that her heartless barbs shaped Sioux’s entire life and self-perception. Sioux’s family was constantly supportive of her dreams — she credits them for being able to make it on the show for so long — but many of the adults in the room failed her.

“They were grown, so if they didn’t want to be presented in that way, they should have acted better,” she says. “Everyone’s story deserves to be told, including mine. I’m not here to protect people, but I’m also not here to bash them. I’m just telling it how it is.”

Though so much of her life was dominated by a reality TV show that painted her as a failure and showed her in her lowest moments, Sioux doesn’t have any regrets. She wanted to do it — no one pressured her into child stardom. She still loves to perform, and the fan base she has built on social media has given her the independence to pursue whatever she wants.

“It made me who I am,” she says. “Always stay true to yourself. It might sound cliché, but it’s true. Don’t let anyone take you out of your character … I didn’t.”

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”