She entered St. Petersburg's Imperial Ballet Academy in 1906, where she was a student of Klavdia Kulichevskaya and later of Yevgenia Sokolova and Agrippina Vaganova.

She continued to perform with the Ballets Russes abroad, dancing "Aurora" in Diaghilev's renowned The Sleeping Princess in London in 1921, and at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 1923.

From 1932 to 1937, she toured with a number of companies throughout the world, performing roles from both the classical repertoire and contemporary ballets by choreographers such as Michel Fokine and Bronislava Nijinska.

[3] Spessivtseva had experienced periods of clinical depression as early as 1934, when she showed signs of mental illness in Sydney and needed hospitalisation.

That same year, she moved to the United States, where she taught and served as an advisor to the Ballet Theatre Foundation in New York City.

Expert dance writers have described her as "the greatest of Russian ballerine at this period",[5] and "The supreme classical ballerina of the century".