Dr. Marisa Crisostomo, PVECOB’s Clinical Assistant Professor of Decision Management, doesn’t just teach in the college classroom, but also helps shape the minds of young dancers as an Instructor of Dance at the Amarillo Performing Arts Center (APAC). Dr. Crisostomo started dancing at the age of eight participating in various dance forms including ballet, tap and musical theater.
She continued honing her dance skills through competitions in high school and in college at Gonzaga University, where she minored in Dance and served as a dancer on Gonzaga’s Dance Team. While in graduate school at the University of Oklahoma, she worked on earning a PhD in Cognitive Psychology specializing in Quantitative Statistics, but also joined the Sooner Dance Company. She was the Creative Director and performed dance numbers at various OU events, including at volleyball games.
When Dr. Crisostomo moved to the Texas Panhandle in 2017 to begin teaching in the PVECOB, she reflected on some advice from one of her dance instructors at Gonzaga who encouraged her to always find a way to fit dance into her day. She took that advice by enrolling in adult dance classes in Amarillo, which then led her to finding a community where she could help other people explore dance.
She became an instructor at APAC in 2021, a position she says “is so fun” and “she loves”, where she teaches a competition dance team, focusing on ages nine to twelve. The team competes locally, but also travels to competitions in Oklahoma City, Dallas, and Albuquerque, participating in various dance genres. The competition teams that Dr. Crisostomo trains performs three group dances and can optionally perform solos or duets. She creates unique choreography pieces for the teams by developing stories that match the dancers’ personalities. Her focus is making the choreography meaningful and connecting it to the dancers’ experiences and aims to ensure the dancers understand the message behind their performances.
Dr. Crisostomo also goes beyond teaching dance skills. While she emphasizes to her students the importance of storytelling in choreography, she also focuses on creating well-rounded individuals through dance by teaching traits including the handling of constructive criticism, continuous improvement, and teamwork.
A central component of Dr. Crisostomo’s dance teaching philosophy is emphasizing to her students the importance of self-improvement over comparison to others. As she states, “The goal is to be better than you were yesterday because comparing yourself to somebody else can set you up for an unhealthy mindset. I’m always saying to the student dancers you’re competing against yourself, right? Can you do two pirouettes versus one pirouette that you did yesterday.”
Dr. Crisostomo also imparts to her dance students the value of working through challenges and persevering, as well as teamwork and shared accomplishments. She places worth on the importance of life lessons over winning, and she wants students to apply the skills learned in dance to other areas of their lives.
To learn more about APAC and Dr. Crisostomo’s instructor role, please read her biography here.
–By Dr. Mary Liz Brooks