Esther Protzman received her ballet training at the Royal Conservatoire and at the Royal Ballet School of Antwerp, Belgium. In 1979 she won a scholarship in Lausanne and studied at the Académie de Danse 'Princesse Grace' in Monte Carlo in the same year. 

Her dance career has a span of nearly 20 years, first at the Royal Ballet of Flanders, Antwerp and later as a soloist with the National Ballet, Amsterdam. She danced many leading roles in the Balanchine repertoire and choreography of (among others) Rudi van Dantzig, Hans van Manen and Toer van Schayk, and the classical repertoire such as Giselle, Odette / Odile in Swan Lake, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Titania in Midsummer Night's Dream and Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, for which she received the Dansersfonds prize in 1989. 

Boris Akimov, Christine Anthony, Mary Aradi, Marika Besobrasova, Panchita the Peri, Konstantin Chatilov, Nanette Glushak, Michael Soames, Olga Evreinoff and many choreographers including Rudi van Dantzig, Hans van Manen, Toer van Schayk, Jiri Kilian and Ashley Page have been of great influence on her dance career. 

After her active career she studied nutrition and she is a certified foot reflexologist. 

In 1998 Esther completed an intensive teacher training ‘Classical Ballet Vaganova Methodology’ at the Hungarian Ballet Academy, Budapest and attended several courses for teachers, such as the National Ballet School Toronto, Canada in 1999 and theBournonville summer courses in Biarritz in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012. She has worked with ballet masters such as David Howard in New York, Frank Andersen from Denmark and Kalina Bogoeva from Bulgaria. 

Besides teaching and studying classical repertoire at the Royal Conservatoire, she taught as a guest teacher at the Dutch National Ballet, The National Ballet Academy, Ballet du Capitole, The Hungarian Dance Academy, Scapino Ballet, Montessori Infant Community and Formazione Tersicore, and other companies and institutions. 

Esther guided students during student exchanges to Barcelona in 2005 and Prague in 2012, and supported our students during the cooperation with the National Ballet in The Sleeping Beauty in 2003, 2006, and 2010 and La Sylphide in 2005. In 2010 she made a choreography for Herman van Veen’s successful project Margot for the Royal Conservatoire. 

Esther Protzman has been a teacher at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague since 2001.