Christine Juarez

Christine Juarez, Executive Director of West Seattle Performing Arts and founded the school with her husband Armando Juarez in 2016.Christine has been directing dance programs for the past 26 years. She has served as the Summer Dance Coordinator directing a national program and teaching for the Preparatory Dance Faculty at Cornish College of the Arts since 1994- 2018. She has served as an integral part of the External Programming team for the college. She served as the acting  Director of Dance for Vashon Center for the Arts since 1996- 2017 on Vashon Island, WA and the Artistic Director of the Vashon Center for the Arts, a pre-professional dance company, Christine has dedicated two decades bringing  the classical and contemporary arts to communities in the Seattle area . She has directed and taught dance to diverse populations for the past 34 years. Christine has also served on the dance faculty of Washington University in St. Louis. She holds a M.S. from Indiana University in Modern dance and Physical Sciences and a B.S. in Ballet and Music from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. Christine is a Master Artist in Residence for the state of Washington and enjoys collaborative projects annually with classroom teachers integrating academics and movement. She has been a presenter of Early Movement Education for the Dance Educators Association of Washington and numerous other conferences. Christine started dance in Philadelphia as a young girl and was trained in the Vaganova syllabus of Ballet. Her training has included an immersion in Opera and she has performed and choreographed numerous operas. To date Christine has staged: Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Coppelia, La Fille Mal Gardee, Firebird, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Serenade, Romeo and Juliet, Rodeo, La Sylphide, and numerous others.  She believes that dance should be accessible to all and that it can be taught in a positive engaging atmosphere. She has dedicated her life to bringing dance to as many people that she can.