Debbie Allen is officially getting her own Barbie doll!
The renowned actress, producer, director, dancer, and entrepreneur is being honored with a Barbie Tribute doll to commemorate her accomplishments in shaping the world of entertainment.
“This is such excitement for me and my whole family,” Allen told Blavity in a recent interview. “I mean, people were excited about me getting the Kennedy Center Honor, the Emmy Award, the Governor’s Award, but when I said ‘Barbie,’ people started screaming. They were falling out and wondering, ‘Where can I get it? When can I get it? I’m like, ‘Honey, calm down. It’s going to be on sale through Mattel. I don’t know what date, but it’s coming out soon.’
She added, “This is truly putting me in a class of women whom I so love and admire. From Shonda Rhimes to Ava DuVernay, [and] Misty Copeland, who I’m going to join next week on stage with her when she retires. Mariah Carey. I mean, this is a long list of women who have been trailblazers and have done work that is inspirational to young women all over the world, and with dolls. It really allows them to get hands-on with someone and start to play with their imagination. I love that.”
Debbie Allen stems from royalty
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, there isn’t a household that isn’t familiar to the women of the Allen family. From her late mother, Vivian Ayers Allen, and her work as a renowned poet, playwright, cultural activist, museum curator and classicist, to her older sister, Phylicia Rashad, who cemented herself in entertainment legacy as Claire Huxtable on The Cosby Show, Allen was destined for greatness, as it was the only thing she knew growing up.
“I’ve grown up with quite a challenge my whole life because my mom, Vivian Ayers Allen, has always raised us to get out here in the world and do something,” she recalled. “It was never enough for us to be women who were beautiful or just educated. What are you doing with that? We were always challenged to share and develop our gifts, and we’ve done that and are doing it every day. I feel blessed to have my sister as a guide for me as a young girl, and my mother being like Mount Vesuvius, towering over us with all this energy, splurting out all the time, and for us to get on that heated path and find ourselves, that’s who we are.”
Allen’s mother, whose book-length poem, “Hawk,” is about space travel and freedom, was honored by NASA’s Apollo program. She died at age 102 in August 2025, laying the foundation for her children to dream big. The same thing that Allen did for her own.
How Allen’s children served as muses for the dance legacy she continues to foster
Much like Barbie creator Ruth Handler was inspired to create the toy company thanks to her daughter, Barbara, Allen’s daughter, Vivian, is credited with founding the Debbie Allen Dance Academy (DADA).
“She’s been my muse since she was a little girl. I sent her away to study at a Russian school, and in the Russian school, it was tough, as it’s supposed to be,” said Allen. “The dance world is born on the pejorative, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that.’ Well, the dance teacher told Vivian one day, ‘You can never dance. You might as well audition for Alvin Ailey.’ As if Alvin Ailey was what? I was like, ‘Girl, no, stop. Don’t make me have to come over there.’ And so I realized that I needed to create a safe space where she could train and the best technique and the best teachers and all of the other kids, too.”
“Because every time I choreographed the Oscars, which was so many times, I’d have to stop and teach dance, because they might not know who Katherine Dunham was, and I’m saying, ‘This is a Dunham-esque, and they don’t know what I’m talking about.”
This year marks 25 years of DADA, and the nonprofit continues to offer a comprehensive dance curriculum to students ages four and up, maintaining its mission, focused on disenfranchised Black and Latino communities, to “use dance, theater, and performance to enrich, inspire, and transform the lives of students,” according to the organization’s website.
“My dear friend, who was the production designer on Amistad, looked at me and said, ‘Debbie,’ this was in ‘97, ‘What are you waiting for? Why are you waiting for permission to breathe?’ So, in 2000, I opened the Debbie Allen Dance Academy. We were not yet a nonprofit. My husband worked his butt off, and we became a nonprofit just before our first fundraiser, Barry Gordy, came in. Wallis Annenberg came in, Shonda Rhimes came in, Ford Foundation, so many individuals and philanthropists, to help us because they could see the work that was being done with young people, elders, and cancer patients. We’re teaching battered women and children. There are so many programs that we’re doing. We’re just starting a class for kids who are challenged with autism, and this is a great class. The world of dance is a world of inspiration, healing, joy, and light.”
It was her son, Norman Nixon Jr., who, at the age of five, inspired the Hot Chocolate Nutcracker after becoming bored during a visit to the traditional Nutcracker, yelled, ‘Mom, when is the rat coming?’
“I was like, ‘Oh, Lord.’ I was embarrassed, but the whole audience laughed out loud,” she shared. “And I said, you know, the boys want to see a rat. I thought about it because I’d participated in a Nutcracker, but it was with Black people, with all of their original music. I said, ‘I think I can do this on my own. I think I can take the Nutcracker and create the Rat Pack. And that’s what I did. I created three rats that became the narrators of how to take us through this world. I changed the names. I got original music, and we have become a tradition here in Los Angeles. It’s so much fun. When I do it, I play Bucky, the youngest rat that’s kind of young and stuttering.”
Allen added, “It is so much fun for me to do this. And you know what was great? A young man came up and said to his mom, ‘Mommy, Bucky talks like me,’ and that made him so happy. It’s not me making fun, it’s me being inclusive of different people and different ideas of what people are living with. I love this show, and we hope to make it a big movie one day. We really know that it would make an incredible feature.”
Her message to little Debbie Allen
Allen’s imagination was piqued as a child, growing up, seeing performers like Shirley Temple, and wondering where the person who looked like her was. Now that she has her own Barbie Tribute Doll, we asked the entertainer what she’d say to that version of herself.
“Little Debbie, keep dreaming your dreams,” she concluded. “See yourself out there in the universe. See yourself out there in the sunlight with the cosmos. You are going to get there. You’re going to look up and you’re going to be right there where you want to be, and even further than you could have ever imagined.”