She was born in Saint Petersburg as Olga Preobrazhenskaya (the final syllable of her surname was dropped to shorten her name for professional purposes, and she used the French transliteration, Preobrajenska).

[3] In addition to her love of dance, Preobrajenskaya had musicality to go with it; she studied singing, performed opera arias, and played the piano masterfully.

She also performed in Ivanov and Gerdt's Sylvia (1901), Nikolai and Sergei Legat's The Fairy Doll (1903), and Mikhail Fokin's The Night of Terpsichore and Chopiniana (1908).

In 1921, following the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union, she emigrated and taught for two years in Milan, London, Buenos Aires and Berlin, then settled in with the large white émigré community in Paris.

[2] For the next several decades, she was one of the most prominent ballet teachers in Paris, instructing Irina Baronova, Tatiana Dokoudovska, Tamara Toumanova and Igor Youskevitch.