Remembering Jamilla Deville, the Pole Pioneer Who Taught the World to Spin

Jamilla Deville died on August 8, 2026, after living with breast cancer.¹ If you have ever called a split a Jade, learned to push and pull your way through a Jamilla, or taught yourself to spin from a DVD in your living room, you learned something from her.

She was a showgirl, an aerialist, a champion, a teacher and a judge.² For a lot of us who started pole at home rather than in a studio, she was also the first instructor we ever had. This is our tribute to her: the life she built, what she gave the pole world, and what happened in the last chapter of her story.

From showgirl to pole pioneer

Long before anyone called pole a sport, Jamilla was a performer. She trained in several dance styles as well as adagio, trapeze, corde lisse and silks,³ and that background shaped the placement, control and long lines that made her pole work so recognizable.⁴

She started pole dancing in 2000.² According to pole historian Lylac Trinchero, she began that year as a stripper at Men’s Gallery, after a childhood spent dancing.⁵ She never treated that part of her story as something to hide. Trinchero writes that Jamilla believed the stigma around pole adds value to the art form, and the crossover between stripping and pole was one of the subjects she talked through on the Pole Obsession podcast.⁶

Building pole in Australia

In 2003, Trinchero writes, Jamilla worked with Bobbi to open Bobbi’s Pole Studio, which she describes as the first pole studio in Australia.⁵ Pole Obsession remembers her as one of the very first pole instructors in the country, performing and teaching at Sydney’s first pole studio.⁶

In 2005 she won the original Miss Pole Dance Australia title.² That same year she became the face of X-Pole Australia,⁴ and X-Pole’s own instructor profile still describes her as the face of the brand.⁷

The Deville, the Jade and the Jamilla

Her Miss Pole Dance Australia win also showed Australian audiences a split they hadn’t seen before. Physiotherapist Simone Muscat has traced the history: the no-hands version had been performed earlier by Pantera Blacksmith, but Jamilla debuted it in Australia when she won, and a Bobbi’s DVD named it the Deville because she popularized it there.⁸

The Jade split, the version with a hand at the hip, carries her name too. There was never a dancer called Jade. The name comes from the first two letters of her first and last names, JA and DE.⁸

Then there’s the Jamilla itself, called the Apprentice in some systems, a classic move that teaches push and pull, hip placement and contact points on the pole.⁴ Almost every pole dancer learns it at some point,¹ and plenty of them never stop to wonder who it was named after. Now you know.

The Art of Pole: the pole dancer’s bible

In 2007 Jamilla released the first volume of The Art of Pole, and over the next six years she created, produced and starred in the whole series.² It grew to five volumes, two Routines DVDs that showed you how to link moves together, and a limited edition in English and Spanish.³ Dancers called it the pole dancer’s bible, and in 2011 Pole Dance International Magazine named it the best DVD series.²

It’s hard to explain to newer dancers what that meant. In 2007 there wasn’t a YouTube tutorial for every trick or an app with hundreds of lessons. If there was no studio near you, there was very little. Her teaching put safety, body placement, alignment, balance and conditioning first, at a time when a lot of what people knew about pole had been passed on informally in clubs.⁴

The Art of Pole was one of the first pole dancing DVDs I ever owned, and I still go back to it. The stills in our beginner pole moves guide come from Volume One. If you want to learn from it today, the series is in our roundup of the best pole dancing DVDs, and the lessons now live online on X-Pole TV,⁷ which we cover in our guide to online pole dancing lessons.

Setting standards for a new sport

Jamilla didn’t only perform and teach. In 2006 she founded the International Pole Federation to set industry standards and help pole dancers around the world talk to each other, and that same year she opened her own studio in Sydney.² She toured and taught internationally from 2007,⁷ and in 2015, for example, she taught three workshops at Pole Convention and performed in its Australian Invasion show.⁹

She spent years at the judges’ table, and the pole world kept voting for her. Her official biography lists, among much else:²

• Miss Pole Dance Australia, 2005, the first year of the title
• Head judge and criteria developer, Australian Pole Dance Championships, 2009 to 2011
• Pole Spin Magazine Instructor of the Year, 2010
• IPDFA International Instructor of the Year, 2010 and 2011
• Pole Dance International Magazine Instructor of the Year and Best DVD Series, 2011
• Official judge, World Pole Dance Championships, Budapest, 2011
• UPA Pro-Poler of the Year, 2014
• Head judge, Pole Expo Pole Classic, 2016

A new life in America

In 2013 Jamilla moved to the United States. She taught at Shine Fitness in Las Vegas for nine years, then moved to Nashville in 2023.⁵ That year she headlined a theater production there,¹⁰ and Nashville Fit Magazine profiled her performing with the Nashville show Shiners, twenty years into her career in acro pole.¹¹

She kept growing as an athlete. She trained and competed in CrossFit,² and in interviews she spoke about the healing side of pole and about encouraging women to explore their bodies and their sensuality.¹² She summed up her whole approach in one line on her own website:

The essential spirit and beauty in pole dancing is found through grace and artistry.

Jamilla Deville²

What happened to Jamilla Deville

After moving to Nashville, Jamilla signed a two-year performance contract. In the same year, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.⁵

She had also begun writing a memoir, Grace Beyond Measure. Her friend and client Mary Lynn Cloghesy writes that Jamilla was about a year into the book when she became ill and the work stopped. Only the preface was finished.¹⁰

The pole community did what it does and showed up. An online fundraiser was set up to help with her care, and in July 2026 Pole Fitness Studio in Las Vegas turned its TASTE dinner and variety show into a fundraiser for her. It raised $4,676, which the studio planned to hand-deliver to her in September.¹³ Pole Lovers reports that she was fighting an aggressive form of the disease, and that the community held fundraising events through 2026 to help cover her care.⁴

One detail in the Pole Lovers tribute is hard to read. In 2006, X-Pole Australia released a limited Jamilla Deville Signature Edition of 100 poles, with part of every sale going to Australia’s National Breast Cancer Foundation. It raised more than 10,000 Australian dollars.⁴ Twenty years later, she died of the disease she had helped raise money to fight.

Jamilla died on August 8, 2026.¹ Her close friend Fawnia Mondey was with her and held her hand at the end.⁵ Cloghesy, who had planned to visit her in Nashville that same month, wrote of the “grit and grace” with which Jamilla faced her illness.¹⁰

How the pole world remembered her

The news traveled fast. Pole Dance Community called her an “OG and Pole Dancing Legend” and wrote that she “will also be remembered for being a lovely person who genuinely cared about pole.”¹⁴ In France, a teacher at Pole Dance Nancy wrote that The Art of Pole had taught them to pole as a beginner,¹ and Pole Lovers closed its tribute with a simple “Merci, Jamilla.”⁴

Felix Cane, who won Miss Pole Dance Australia the year after Jamilla,¹⁵ co-hosts the Pole Obsession podcast with Elizabeth Domazet. On August 13, 2026, they released an episode remembering her, built around a conversation with Jamilla about the early days of Australian pole, life in Nashville, writing a book and her plans for the future of pole.⁶ If you want to hear her tell her own story, start there.

Trinchero ends her history of Jamilla by asking readers to thank strippers as the foundation of pole dance.⁵ It feels like the right note for a woman who came from the clubs and helped carry pole into studios all over the world, without ever looking down on where it started.

Her legacy is in every studio

Trinchero says Jamilla spent 26 years giving the world a gift.⁵ You can see it in the names of the moves, in instructors who learned from her DVDs and now teach their own students, and in the idea, which seems obvious now, that pole should be taught carefully, step by step, with the body’s safety in mind. If you want to know more about how pole got from the clubs to where it is now, our history of pole dancing is a good place to start.

If The Art of Pole was part of your story too, maybe put it on this week. Do the warm-up properly, the way she taught it. Then dance a Jamilla for her.

Thank you, Jamilla.

Sources

1. “Jamilla Deville : une légende de la Pole Dance nous a quittés,” Pole Dance Nancy – Spin & Fly, August 14, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
2. Jamilla Deville, “About,” Jamilla Deville official website. ↩︎
3. “The Art of Pole,” official Art of Pole website (DVD range and biography). ↩︎
4. “Jamilla Deville : hommage à une pionnière qui a façonné l’histoire de la pole dance,” Pole Lovers, August 23, 2026 (in French). ↩︎
5. Lylac Trinchero, “Pole History Article I,” YAS Work (Substack), August 25, 2026. ↩︎
6. Elizabeth Domazet and Felix Cane, “Remembering Jamilla Deville | From Australia’s First Pole Studio to the Global Stage,” Pole Obsession podcast, season 1, episode 34, August 13, 2026. ↩︎
7. “Jamilla Deville,” X-Pole TV instructor profile. ↩︎
8. Simone Muscat, “Anatomy of a Jade Split,” The Pole Physio, April 1, 2024 (updated July 30, 2024). ↩︎
9. “Interview with Jamilla Deville,” Pole Convention, August 7, 2015. ↩︎
10. Mary Lynn Cloghesy, “Letting Go,” Wild Rose Writer’s World (Substack), September 29, 2026. ↩︎
11. NFM Staff, “From Australia to Nashville: Jamillia Deville’s 20-Year Journey in Acro Pole Performance,” Nashville Fit Magazine. ↩︎
12. Gabriela Rosa, “Dance as a Tool for Sexual Empowerment with Jamilla Deville,” TalkSex with Gabriela Rosa, episode 24, March 13, 2022. ↩︎
13. “TASTE Raises $4,676 for Jamilla,” Pole Fitness Studio, Las Vegas, July 24, 2026. ↩︎
14. “Paying Tributes to a Pole Legend – Jamilla Deville,” Pole Dance Community, August 13, 2026. ↩︎
15. “Felix Cane,” Wikipedia. ↩︎