They say stars aren’t born — they’re made. If that’s true, then Pollyanna Demitro has been making stars for 45 years.

In a rehearsal room tucked inside a warehouse off Pearl Parkway, one can find Demitro in her natural habitat: equal parts choreographer, costume wrangler, life coach, lighting designer and emotional first responder. At Boulder Performing Arts Company, the youth theater studio she co-founded in 1980 at just 20 years old, kids belt show tunes with unfiltered joy, dance across hardwood floors and grow into the spotlight under Pollyanna’s watchful, wildly creative eye.

This year, Boulder Performing Arts Company is turning the same age as Lin-Manuel Miranda, and is celebrating 4.5 decades of helping young performers find their voice, their footing and their moment in the spotlight. What began as a modest dance studio has grown into a full-fledged youth theater company that’s helped generations of Boulder kids grow not just into performers, but into confident and imaginative humans.

Demitro’s path to teaching wasn’t part of any master plan. She was only 18 years old when her father died of cancer, a loss that pulled her inward at a moment when she’d been preparing to leap forward. She had been accepted to medical school and had every intention of leaving Boulder behind, but in the wake of her father’s passing, the thought of moving away from her mother and younger sister felt impossible.

“I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my mom and my sister,” she said. “So I stayed.”

Her younger sister, already enrolled in CU Boulder’s dance department, suggested she take a class or two to lift her spirits. What began as a distraction quickly became a calling. Pollyanna fell headfirst into modern dance and into the orbit of the department’s founding artists.

By age 20, still attending CU and needing to pay her way through school, she and her sister decided to open a dance studio. What was supposed to be a short-term side hustle quietly became a lifelong pursuit.

“I needed a way to afford school, so my sister and I had an idea to teach classes,” she said. “And that was the beginning of Boulder Performing Arts.”

Her original plan had been to head to New York after graduation, maybe start a company and become the next Martha Graham. However, again and again, life nudged her to stay in Boulder.

“I kept having things happen that kept me here,” she said.

In the early years of running the studio, she taught a little bit of everything: ballroom, modern, martial arts, adult movement classes. Surprisingly, though, it was the children who kept coming back. They filled the studio with noise and energy, and over time, they became the center of the work.

As enrollment grew, so did Demitro’s sense of direction. For Demitro, teaching kids was about providing them a place to figure out who they were — to move through their fears and to find confidence in their own time.

When Demitro became a parent, she started to question the expectations baked into so much of the dance world, especially for young girls, and the way traditional training often prioritized uniformity over individuality.

“It was very structured,” she said. “It had a lot to do with your body size and being part of a group that all looked the same. I didn’t like that.”

Demitro’s trio of children, John, Lulu and Demi Demitro, were all born and raised in Boulder and have eqully achieved acclaimed success with their bands. John and Lulu front the desert rock band Pink Fuzz and Demi is the lead vocalist for rising international stars, garage-fuzz band The Velveteers, which just released a second album.

So Demitro changed the model.

Instead of asking kids to conform to a certain shape or style, she let the work bend to meet them where they were, shifting Boulder Performing Arts into a musical theater program that allowed for more flexibility, more emotion, more personality and more play.

At BPA, casting isn’t about who’s the most polished or technically perfect, but who is ready for the challenge — who needs that moment of growth and can rise to meet it, even if it looks different than what you’d expect. Demitro takes her time with each student, designing roles to match their abilities and their needs, giving them small, yet meaningful opportunities to stretch themselves and build confidence through the process of rehearsal and performance.

“If I didn’t care about their emotional growth, I’d just cast the best person for the part,” she said. “But that’s not our focus.”

Some students come in unsure how to hold a note or speak clearly onstage, some are working through anxiety or attention challenges, and some simply need the chance to be seen for who they are, without judgment or pressure to be anything else.

“Somebody might be the A-plus perfect person for the lead role,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean that’s the person who would get it. It’s the person who needs that experience.”

She added: “Once they’ve had that moment, and once they realize that they can be onstage and be themselves, many of them fall in love with performing. Some kids stay for a season, and many more stay for six. They grow up here.”

Over the years, those seasons have added up, and thousands of kids have come through the studio — some shy, some bold, some with jazz hands from the very beginning. Many of them have gone on to perform in college, on national tours, on television sets and in international ballet companies. For Demitro, however, the true joy isn’t seeing her students’ résumés or spotlight moments. It’s having them come back.

One of her former students, a classically trained dancer who left BPA at age 14, went on to join the Russian Bolshoi Ballet and later became a prima ballerina with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet in Manitoba, Canada. Years later, she walked back through the doors of the Boulser studio, this time holding her young daughter by the hand, and when she saw Pollyanna, she started to cry.

“She hugged me and pulled me off to the side,” Demitro said. “It was so fun for me to know that she felt like her start with us was what really catapulted her.”

That student wasn’t the only one. BPA alums have appeared on “American Idol,” landed roles in shows like “Fargo” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and signed record deals, voiceover contracts and embarked on tour dates.

After 45 years, the casts have changed, the scripts have rotated, and the lighting’s a little less janky — but the center of gravity hasn’t budged. It’s still Demitro, hot-gluing costumes, calling cues, remembering every kid’s name and making sure the spotlight always finds the right face.

This spring, Boulder Performing Arts Company will celebrate its 45th year with full productions, including “Mean Girls” and “Beetlejuice,” followed by a summer of camps and a fall season that includes “Matilda,” “The Little Mermaid” and a special anniversary showcase featuring returning alumni.

For more information on BPA and to enroll in summer camps, visit boulderperformingarts.com.