James Sutton

17 Feb James Sutton

James Sutton, dancer, teacher, choreographer, and writer, was for fourteen years an Associate Arts Professor in Dance at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and is currently company teacher and choreographer for New York Theatre Ballet. He was the co-recipient of the Balasaraswati/Joy Ann Dewey Beinecke Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching from the American Dance Festival in 2015.

As a performer, he danced with Houston Ballet, Chicago Ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Milwaukee Ballet, and DANCERS.  Formerly Associate Director of the Kathryn Posin Modern Dance Company, he formed his own company in New York in 1983.  His choreographic commissions span all aspects of theater and dance, from operas and musicals to ballet and contemporary dance.

A frequent guest instructor and adjudicator around the US, he has taught on the faculties of The University of Texas at Austin (UT-NY), Marymount Manhattan College, Connecticut College, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Michigan, among others, as well as many summers with the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC; Japan; Korea) beginning in 1985.

He was formerly ballet master for Ballet Hispanico of New York, and, for five years, a company teacher for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. Internationally, he has been a guest teacher at the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia; Cloud-Gate Dance Theatre in Taipei, Taiwan; Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia; and the Cullberg Ballet and Balett Akademien in Stockholm, Sweden, among other venues across Europe and Asia.

Previously an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and teacher of ballet and composition at the Juilliard School in New York, he has recently worked in Communications for Brooklyn Academy of Music and is a contributing writer for Playbill.