Ballerina. One of her country's prolific artists, she shall be remembered for her long tenure at Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet. Raised in Leningrad, she trained at the Leningrad Ballet School, made her 1953 professional bow with the Kirov Ballet in "The Nutcracker", and in 1956 moved on to the Bolshoi where her first major hit was in a Covent Garden presentation of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake". While quite capable of performing the 'standards' such as "Sleeping Beauty", "Giselle", and "Don Quixote", her greatest acclaim came in new works, often in a villainess role, of which she premiered about 50 for the Bolshoi, many of them soon to be forgotten. Nina presented four well-received efforts by choreographer Yuri Grigorovich, playing the courtesan Aegina in "Sparticus", the seductive Mistress of the Copper Mountain in "The Stone Flower", a piece set to Serge Prokofiev's final ballet score, the unfortunate Queen Mekhmene Banu in "The Legend of Love", and the doomed title heroine of a 1979 setting of "Romeo and Juliet". For choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky, she danced the Young Girl in "Night City", a piece set to Bella Bartok's "Miraculous Mandarin Music". Nina was Lady Macbeth in a 1980 presentation of "Macbeth", the music composed by her husband Kirill Molchanov; on March 14, 1982 Molchanov died in his seat waiting for the curtain to go up on a performance of the work, the show, at Nina's insistence, going on. Her romantic life was interesting, featuring at least two marriages, in addition to Molchanov, she wed conductor Gennady Rozdestvensky, and a string of romantic interludes, with her having a baby by cinematographer Gregory Rerberg in 1972. Long involved in politics, she frequently represented the Bolshoi on tour, served as a deputy to the Supreme Soviet from 1966 to 1970, and was designated People's Artist of the USSR in 1969. Following her 1988 retirement from the stage, she taught at the Bolshoi until the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, at which time she relocated to Israel with her daughter. The pair founded the Jerusalem Ballet School and in 1993 Nina published "Mir baleta" a ballet book for Russian readers. She lived out her days in Jerusalem; at her demise a number of her televised performances were preserved on DVD.