Everything to know about internet star Hannah Neeleman AKA 'Ballerina Farm'

When The Times journalist Megan Agnew published her article last week about Hannah Neeleman, the Mormon woman who runs several social media profiles under the brand 'Ballerina Farm', the internet went wild.

Neeleman's hugely popular videos depict her seemingly idyllic, home-spun lifestyle in rural Utah with her family.

Now, Ballerina Farm and the Neelemans are everywhere, from think pieces on the rise of 'traditional wives' who bake bread from scratch and have many babies, to videos unpacking the sinister undertones of Hannah and husband Daniel's relationship.

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Agnew spent a day with the Neelemans, and as she points out at the start of the article, Ballerina Farm is a carefully-curated digital image. Beneath the shiny veneer of wholesome home content and her blonde all-American look, Hannah Neeleman is exhausted – so much so "she sometimes gets so ill… that she can't get out of bed for a week."

If that isn't proof enough of 34-year-old Hannah's double life, earlier this year, she competed in a beauty pageant eleven days post-partum from her eighth child.

The Neelemans have a cleaner but no childcare, and Hannah does all the food shopping and cooking without her husband. As Agnew puts it, "she bakes perfectly scored sourdough loaves, milks cows straight into her coffee cup and gives birth by candlelight with no pain relief."

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Unsurprisingly, the label 'trad wife' – which describes a recent movement challenging girlboss feminism by re-centreing traditional gender roles – has been applied to Neeleman by Agnew and others.

Neeleman herself doesn't explicitly identify with the label, though as Daniel points out, "We can't help it. This is what we are. If we're trad dad, trad wife, so be it." 

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The namesake of the Ballerina Farm brand is perhaps the most hard-hitting part of the article. When Agnew finally wrangles some alone time with Hannah – Daniel is insistent on speaking for and over her – she asks if this was what she always wanted: to live on a farm and spend her days in the throes of childcare. 

"No," Hannah says straight out. "My goal was New York City. I left home at 17 and I was so excited to get there, I just loved that energy. And I was going to be a ballerina. I was a good ballerina… But I knew that when I started to have kids my life would start to look different."

Neeleman was a Juilliard student when she met Daniel, the son of billionaire founder to multiple commercial airlines, David Neeleman. They were both raised Mormon.

Though Hannah refused to go on a date with Daniel for six months, he arranged for them to be seated next to each other on Hannah's flight back to Julliard – his father owned the company. They were married two months later, and expecting in three.

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When Agnew asks Daniel the same question about their lives, he tells her that yes, this was exactly what he always wanted, though he "expected Hannah to be more at home with the kids."

Hannah's sacrifice at the heart of her and Daniel's relationship has been a point of online scrutiny since the article's publication. 

As multiple commentators online have pointed out, the Neelemans' adherence to traditional gender roles is underpinned by the Mormon belief system.

As one ex-Mormon woman (@hayleyrawle) pointed out on TikTok: "[The] conditioning that Mormon women have [is] that our role in life, our divine role even, is to be wives and mothers."

Others have taken the article as a warning against the 'trad wife' trend, while some have defended Hannah's 'free will' to live how she wants (despite being raised in a deeply religious environment and giving up her ballerina dreams). 

Agnew posted a follow up to her initial article a few days ago, where she observed that while many childless, working women feel that Neeleman is threatening their freedom, women who care for children full-time feel "judged or patronised for doing so by women who haven't."

Whatever side of the debate you stand on, Agnew's article reveals how the 'trad wife' movement can be both rewarding and dangerous, with other social media-famous trad-wife Mormons like the model Nara Smith also having their moment. 

And although Hannah Neeleman might be touted as a self-sufficient business woman with her social media success (even selling products under the brand name), as several spectators have pointed out, it's 'Ballerina Farm', not Ballerina's Farm.

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