Christi Jay

Tempe, Arizona, USA
They/them, she/her

The main focus of their practice as a teacher and scholar is to conceive jazz and vernacular dance as inseparable from the music, history, and power structures that shaped it — using rigorous research to deepen how social dancers understand the cultural lineage they're participating in. Christi Jay's proposal is to bring the same care and depth from the academy onto the dance floor, illuminating the complex intersections of jazz music, race, and discourse for dancers and scholars alike.

Dancer, Teacher, and Scholar based in Tempe, Arizona. Christi Jay Wells is an associate professor of musicology at Arizona State University's School of Music, Dance and Theatre and a Race, Arts & Democracy Fellow with ASU's Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. An interdisciplinary scholar in jazz history, popular music studies, dance studies, and arts & cultural policy, they received their doctorate in 2014 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where their dissertation on drummer/bandleader Chick Webb and swing music in Harlem during the Great Depression earned the Society for American Music's Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award and UNC's Glen Haydon Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology. They have also received Videmus's Edgar A. Toppin Award for Outstanding Research in African American Music, a Morroe Berger/Benny Carter Jazz Research Fellowship from the Institute of Jazz Studies, and the Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music.

A social jazz and blues dancer for twenty years, Wells has lectured and worked as a clinician at national and international dance workshops. Their first book, Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance (Oxford University Press, 2021), explores the intersections of jazz music, social and popular dance, race, power, and discourse from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century — earning the Kealiinohomoku Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology's Dance, Movement and Gesture section, and finalist recognition for the Dance Studies Association's de la Torre Bueno First Book Award and the Woody Guthrie First Book Award from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch. They've published articles in Women & Music, Jazz & Culture, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and Daedalus, alongside multiple chapters on jazz dance history for the Oxford Handbook series. They're currently working on their second book, a study of the Smithsonian Institution's history of jazz programming and patronage.

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