About Jonelle

Jonelle Seitz is a strategist, arts champion, and content leader based in Austin, TX. She was the Austin Chronicle’s dance critic from 2007 to 2018, has consulted on digital community strategy for nonprofits including the United Nations Girl Up Foundation and the Climate Reality Project, and has helped transform content strategy for Charles Schwab and AT&T. A published poet and former professional dancer, her work is driven by an understanding of both artists and audiences, and the conviction that the arts are essential to the human experience. 

As a dance critic, Jonelle documented dance and performance in Austin from 2007 to 2018, during a period of exponential growth for the city, in over 175 reviews, artist profiles, studio visits, essays, and special sections in the Chronicle, as well as in Ballet Review, Fjord Review, AdobeAirstream, and Dance Magazine. In writing and through service on the Austin Critics Table, she championed the work of Sharon Marroquín, Anuradha Naimpally (Austin Dance India), Magdalena Jarkowiec, Jennifer Hart (Performa/Dance), Julie Nathanielsz, Charles O. Anderson, and others. She also wrote about touring and guest artists, interviewing Suzanne Farrell and Garth Fagan and reviewing Spectrum Dance Theater, Black Grace, Deborah Hay, and Michelle Dorrance. She regularly covered Fusebox Festival, Big Range Dance Festival, and Austin Dance Festival. 

Over more than a decade in arts journalism, she covered performance art, theater, live music, and books in addition to dance genres including classical, neoclassical, and contemporary ballet, rhythm tap, bharata natyam, modern, postmodern, contemporary, contemporary derived from cultures of the African diaspora, folklorico, flamenco, contemporary derived from Chicano cultures, Soundpainting, mixed-ability dance, dance theater, and fusion forms.

Since 2017, Jonelle has worked with organizations to create mission-driven and audience-centric community and content strategies. She created, implemented, and performed metrics-based assessment of digital campaigns and long-term initiatives for AT&T, Charles Schwab, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Climate Reality Project, the United Nations Girl Up Foundation, the American Heart Association, and national and international professional associations. A thought leader and driver of progress, she has successfully lobbied to strengthen brand voices and community affiliations, improve content discoverability and accessibility of archives, and initiate conversation-first and content-forward design, inclusive language, design ethics practices, and community building. She currently serves on the board of Performa/Dance.

Jonelle’s writing on arts phenomena and strategy include her newsletter project The Gym (2018–2019), which explored the intersection of performing and writing practices and the slippery vantage point of the critic. Her 2016 piece “The Talk,” for Fjord Review, critically analyzed post-performance conversations on dance. She has presented on community building and approaching dance at conferences including Computers and Writing, Personifest, and Dance and Philosophy, and her chapter “Movement on Record” is included in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Dance and Philosophy (2021). 

As an undergraduate at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, she was a two-time winner of the Dorothea Brooke Scholarship for Literary Criticism. Later, she studied poetry under Bill Knott and activist publishing under former South End Press editor Jill Petty, earning a master of arts in writing and publishing at Emerson College. Her poetry has appeared in Passages North, Borderlands, Painted Bride Quarterly, and the anthology The Body I Live In. She has also been an editor and copyeditor for print and digital works.

Jonelle’s writing and strategy work is grounded in her firsthand experience in arts practices. She trained in the Royal Academy of Dancing and Vaganova methods of ballet, attending Classical Ballet School and the Kirov Academy of Ballet on scholarship before dancing with Ballet Iowa, Sarasota Ballet, David Taylor Dance Theatre, and other companies and independent choreographers. As a teacher and mentor for students of both dance and writing, she has worked with college students, adult beginners, and children of all ages.