Abby Lee Miller, 52, is back in the dance studio for Dance Moms season 8. She will be coaching a new set of dancers at the Abby Lee Dance Company. She left the series in season 7 and has since battled Burkitt lymphoma and served 8 months in prison for bankruptcy fraud. She’s cancer free now and in a wheelchair but Abby stressed that she’s still the same type of coach as she was before she left Dance Moms. “As far as choreography, I’m still very involved,” Abby told HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY at Lifetime’s Summer Luau on May 20. “As far as designing the costumes or coming up with them or finding them somewhere in Pittsburgh while we’re shooting, I do all of that. I still fight with the producers about the music. I fight with the producers about the dances and the routines and the mothers fight with me about everything else. It’s pretty much Dance Moms. We have some incredible dancing. Some really, really talented dancers. I wish that I could teach class more, but the hours just are not available.”
Abby Lee is a tough coach and she’s going to continue to be a tough coach. She only wants to make her dancers the best they can be. She also noted: “I think everyone’s expecting a different me. My genes were installed when I was born, you know? I think that people are the same. As situations change, circumstances change, but I don’t think people really change. I’ve always been really kind. People don’t think that because they don’t see it on TV, but I am that. I am very giving and very loving, especially with children.”
The Dance Moms star underwent 5 rounds of chemotherapy for Burkitt lymphoma and had to learn to walk again after an emergency spinal surgery in 2018. Despite her many setbacks, Abby Lee is hopeful about the future.
“I hope somewhere I find that silver lining,” she told HL. “I hope it was all for something. I always say ‘will it matter that I was [here]?’ I want it to matter that I was here on this earth. That I did something positive and that I changed a lot of kids lives.” Dance Moms season 8 airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on Lifetime.