Christi Jay Wells (they/them/theirs) 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 the fields of 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. Their doctoral dissertation on drummer/bandleader Chick Webb and swing music in Harlem during the Great Depression received 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 been a lecturer and 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 complex intersections between jazz music, social & popular dance, race, power, and discourse from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century. Between Beats received the Kealiinohomoku Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology's Dance, Movement and Gesture section and was a finalist 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 have published articles in the journals Women & Music, Jazz & Culture, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Daedalus and have multiple chapters on jazz dance history topics for volumes in the Oxford Handbook series. They are currently working on their second book: a study of the Smithsonian Institution's substantial history of jazz programming and patronage.