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.
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.
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