Christine C. Wyatt is a DMV based choreographer, performer, dance educator, and culture bearer whose work is grounded in the African continuum, centering Africanist movement values and a deep commitment to community-based, anti-racist, artmaking. She currently teaches in the dance school at her alma mater, the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, MD. She began her training at the age of nine at Baltimore’s historic Flair Dance & Modeling Agency and later the Arena Playhouse, where her love for dance and theatre first took root. From these roots emerged a curiosity for dance as both an art form and a site of cultural archiving. After almost a decade of consistent training and performance in Musical Theater, Ballet, Jazz, Modern and Tap she decided to further her dance training on a collegiate level.
Christine is a distinguished graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University with a B.F.A. in Dance & Choreography. She graduated with honors, receiving several awards, research fellowships, and VCU’s Black History in the Making Award (2017) for academic excellence and volunteer work. Her undergraduate training, shaped profoundly by the leadership of E. Gaynell Sherrod, Ed.D., was informed by a lineage of artists and programs, including Urban Bush Women and its Summer Leadership Institute (founded by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar), that foreground movement as a tool for telling undertold stories of women, building community, and contributing to social change. Her exposure to and direct experience with artists, during her time at VCU, such as Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange, MK Abadoo, nora chipaumire, Maria Bauman, Camille A. Brown, Johnnie Mercer/The RED Project, Jelani Taylor, and Paris Cian continue to inspire her interest in dance that explore risk, identity, and place.
Christine’s development as a choreographer, educator and dancer have been shaped by her collaborative mentors like MK Abadoo, Dr. Tawnya Pettiford Wates, Mari Andrea Travis, Kevin Lamar Jones, Alicia Díaz/Agua Dulce Dance Theatre, Cristina Leoni-Osion and sehay sun. She has taught and performed across theatres in Virginia, choreographed for University productions across the country and has a portfolio that includes musicals, classic works reimagined, devised Black theatre and original dance works. Intelligence is her first choreographic contribution to Virginia Opera’s repertoire, but she is no stranger to the world of Opera. She made her operatic debut as a featured dancer in Richard Kennedy’s Touch of Elegance (2019), a new opera commissioned by the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA).
After graduating from VCU, Christine apprenticed with Urban Bush Women, under the artistic direction of Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra (Samantha) Speis, while holding Artistic Residence at Gibney Dance. Christine made her New York performance debut in 2020, in her self-choreographed solo “Ti’ed” a reimagining of her senior thesis project. Later that summer, she was featured in Alicia Diaz’s “Entre Puerto Rico y Richmond: Women in Resistance shall not be moved”, a collaborative dance film honoring women’s resistance during labor movements connecting the histories of resistance against US colonialism and capitalism in Puerto Rico and Richmond, Virginia. This film was featured in a mixed media exhibit at the ICA in 2020, featured in the virtual Afrikana Film Festival (2020) and has since been featured in dozens of Film Festivals internationally, winning several awards.
In 2021, Christine, a founding company member, became the Rehearsal Director and Company Manager of MKArts, MK Abadoo’s intergenerational, community building, dance company that amplifies the lives and wisdom of Black/Queer Women and gender expansive folks, established in 2016. She has performed many of Abadoo’s works including Octavia’s Brood: Riding the Ox Home (2018, 2022), Hoptown (2023) and the site-specific production Untold RVA Presents: BROTHER GENERAL GABRIEL (2019) in Shockoe Bottom, blending historical memory and embodied storytelling at the African Burial Grounds in Richmond, VA. Christine and MK’s creative and administrative collaboration transcends traditional and colonial methods of working together by centering ancestral honoring, sistering technologies, and uplifting Black communities through strategic partnership and art making. This work informs Christine’s personal mission of continuing legacies of resistance, equity and care through Black Art and liberated practice.
A significant influence in deepening the applicability of Wyatt’s perspective in her practice is her ongoing creative partnership with Tawnya Pettiford-Wates, Ph, D, Professor of Graduate Pedagogy in Acting and Artistic Director of The Conciliation Project. Christine has served as Choreographer and Embodiment Coach on several shows under Pettiford-Wates’ direction, including For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf (2024), Whitesplaining (2022), Get Up, Stand Up (2022) Les Blancs (2021), and Passing Strange (2018). Their collaboration deepens Christine’s liberated practice through ritual, embodiment, and socially engaged performance; refining the exploration of her values and techniques for achieving goals of self empowerment, communal sense of belonging and authentic creativity.
Following the philosophical lineage of Pearl Primus, Christine approaches dance as a catalyst for truth-telling, human connection and embodied liberation. Her dance work utilizes improvisation, African American Vernacular dance alongside neo classical and contemporary African movement to honor traditions of the African Diaspora. Christine’s artistic practice is also informed by her study of care and grief work, so she centers opportunities for commemorative justice to tell stories of joy and resistance, and opportunities to explore the expansive power of Black movement traditions that impact audiences beyond the proscenium seats. Her full presence as a Black woman artist is neither secondary nor symbolic—it is central and essential. Christine’s choreography is ancestral memory, contemporary urgency, and future‐building hope through dance with every step.