Faculty Member
Christa St. John is an Assistant Professor of Ballet and serves as the Ballet Program Coordinator and Co-Artistic Director of Repertory Ballet Ensemble at Utah Valley University (UVU). Her extensive professional performance career includes dancing with Ballet Austin, Louisville Ballet, Charleston Ballet Theatre, Atlantic City Ballet, and Northwest Florida Ballet. Throughout her career, she worked with esteemed national and international artists and performed diverse repertoire spanning contemporary and classical genres.
Before joining UVU, St. John was the Elementary Division Director at Northwest Florida Ballet Academie, Artist-in-Residence at Western Kentucky University, and Graduate Teaching Fellow at the University of Oklahoma where she served as Ballet Master for Oklahoma Festival Ballet and as Ballet Master and Choreographer for OU Opera Theatre.
St. John embarked on her choreographic path in 2014, marked by her commission to create her own full-length version of The Nutcracker for Ballet Indiana. Since then, she has premiered numerous works for both professional companies and university dancers, frequently collaborating with artists from film, music, theatre, and visual arts.
Her scholarly pursuits center on interdisciplinary collaboration and the intersection of dance and gender. She has presented scholarly and choreographic works at national and international conferences and festivals. In recognition of her contributions, St. John was honored with UVU's Faculty Excellence Award for the School of the Arts during the 2023-2024 academic year. She holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Dance from the University of Oklahoma.
Major: Ballet/Dance
Major: Dance
Ballet Choreography, Spring 2025
Repertory Ballet Ensemble, Spring 2025
Repertory Ballet Ensemble, Spring 2025
Special Topics in Dance, Spring 2025
The Office of Academic Affairs hosts an annual event for selected faculty who demonstrated excellence in scholarship and creative works during the previous academic year.
"The purpose of the Faculty Senate Faculty Excellence Award is to recognize full-time and adjunct faculty who have made significant contributions to UVU's mission through demonstrated excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service. Through this award, UVU intends_ To publicly acknowledge the achievements of its faculty members in creating an academically engaged environment at UVU. To demonstrate to the community the exemplary standards of academic professionalism to which the faculty members of UVU are dedicated; To encourage faculty within UVU to pursue the highest levels of excellence in every aspect of their work (consistent with the best of academic traditions)." https_//www.uvu.edu/facsenate/awards.html
Co-Authors Christa St. John and Jamie A. Johnson were awarded the best art paper by the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters for their 2023 publication in the Journal of the Utah Academy titled, "Sylphs Supporting Sylphs_ Confronting Gender Binaries in the Ballet Canon."
