About Us | The Community Nutcracker

Meet the Company

Kay Anderson, Jennie Grimes, Lise Mills, and Rhett Guter from the original CCJB company performance of Cinderella in 2021

Artistic Director

Jennie Grimes

Dance Educator and Performer

Jennie Grimes is a dedicated dance educator, performer, and mother of five. She is currently the dance teacher at Canyon View High School (CVHS) where her dance program is a chapter school for National Honors Society for Dance Arts (NHSDA). She also serves as a board member for the Cedar Valley Community Theatre (CVCT), the Utah Dance Education Organization (UDEO) where she serves on the Utah High School Dance Festival and All-State Dance Ensemble committees, and Festival City Ballet. Jennie is the high school representative for the Florence Dance study abroad program in Florence, Italy with the AlambradoDanza company.

Jennie holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Dance Performance and Education with a minor in Theatre from Southern Utah University (SUU), where she later became an adjunct professor. At SUU, she received training from renowned instructors such as Kay Anderson, Gwen Grimes, Shauna Mendini, and Lise Mills. She was selected to perform works by Jose Limon under the direction of Risa Steinberg from Juilliard, as well as pieces from the American Folk Ballet founded by Burch Mann.

Throughout her career, Jennie has trained under legendary artists in various dance styles and competitive gymnastics and has performed with several prestigious companies, including Arabesque Ballet Company, Ballet Repertory Dance Company, Eagle Dancers, Orchesis Modern Company, Junior Jazz Dancers, and AlambradoDanza in Florence, Italy, where she also worked as a choreographer. She has been a principal dancer for St. George Dance Company and the original Cedar City Junior Ballet, under the direction of Lise and Chris Mills.

In 2023 and 2026, Jennie was nominated for the Sorenson Legacy Awards for Excellence in Arts Education, recognizing her outstanding contributions to the field. She is passionate about teaching, performing, and sharing the art of dance with others.

Assistant Production Manager

Bethany Campbell

Bethany Campbell’s love of dance started at age three, when she first started ballet at Hosanna Dance in Eugene OR. She grew as a dancer and got her first pair of pointe shoes at age 10. Since then she has continued to dance ballet, hip hop, jazz, tap, and lyrical. Bethany was on a competitive dance team in high school and loved it, but missed ballet. She took ballet classes at the University of Oregon and danced at Unity school of dance. She finished her last performance with Unity in 2014, before moving to San Diego CA, where she married her husband.

While living in San Diego she was able to continue training in ballet. After becoming a mother to her beautiful children and moving again to Cincinnati OH., finding the time to dance was difficult. Now that she is in Cedar City, she has found an incredible dance community that she absolutely loves. This is her second year being a part of the Community Nutcracker and she is so happy to once again be a part of the most wonderful time of year.

Costuming Supervisor

Jami Lyn Niles

Jami Lyn Niles has 3 children & has been married to her sweetheart, Jason, for 20 years. She danced with Cache Valley Ballet Co. when she was young. When she moved to Cedar City, she had the opportunity to dance with Cedar City Jr. Ballet in their inaugural year. She paid tuition by sewing costumes for the company and eventually had the amazing opportunity to work under Lise Mills who was her mentor for the next 18 years. She also helps do costuming for other local dance companies. Her children all danced ballet at one point, even her son! She loves watching them perform. She loves to sew and create beautiful costumes.

Rehearsal Assistant

Kristena Hunsaker

Kristena Hunsaker was raised on a farm in Price Utah with three older brothers. She found every opportunity to dance, including at the store. She danced with various studios and the Dino Dynamics drill team. Kristena performed en pointe at Capitol Theater at the Miss Utah pageant as the reigning Miss Carbon County. She later directed the scholarship pageant for three years where she started the Mini, Little, and Junior Miss pageant. Kristena has her Bachelor’s degree and is a registered nurse in the ER at Cedar City Hospital. She participated in a dreams come true program at an assisted living facility by teaching a resident ballet and holding a showcase for her.

She fell in love with the Nutcracker through Carolyn Gwither and the CEU Repertory Ensemble, where she was only in junior high but danced with college students. She played her dream roles of Clara and the Sugar Plum Fairy. She has taught ballet for 15 years and currently teaches at Dance Magic. She wrote and directed her own production of the Polar Express, assisted in starting and choreographing the Castle Valley Civic Ballet’s Nutcracker, and is honored to share her love of ballet through the Community Nutcracker. This year marks her 10th Nutcracker.

Kristena loves teaching young dancers and making ballet more imaginative. She is a mom of three amazing girls (Mckinley, Brielle, and Melody) and loves sharing dance with them and performing as a family in the Nutcracker. She is grateful for her husband Regan, his support of her dreams and willingness to help. Dance has allowed her to see more beauty in the world and grow a dance family/community.

Rehearsal Assistant

Elizabeth Condie

Elizabeth Condie has been dancing for almost 40 years now, and her passion for ballet has only grown stronger. She has studied in many dance genres, both throughout her childhood and through college at BYU. She is currently the preschool director and Octane Company coach at Ignite Dance Studio, where she has been teaching for the last four years. A recent accomplishment of hers was becoming Ms. Beauty of America in the fall of 2024, where she performed a jazz solo for the first time on stage in twenty years. She has been involved in the Community Nutcracker performance for the last two years and is looking forward to many, many more years of Nutcracker magic.

Rehearsal Assistant

Christine Mills

Christine Mills has been dancing and performing on stage since she was a child. Her extensive training includes ballet, modern, character, African, jazz, flamenco, and tap. As a young dancer, Christine was among those chosen in the Los Angeles area to perform in the New York City Ballet’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Nutcracker, the Bolshoi Ballet’s production of Ballet School, the Leningrad Kirov Ballet’s Cinderella and was a soloist with Burch Mann’s American Folk Ballet for ten years. In 2003 Ms. Mills founded the Cedar City Junior Ballet company and later founded the Les Bois Junior Ballet in Nampa, ID.

Christine has returned to Cedar City to continue teaching ballet in its purest form. Her teaching technique utilizes the I.S.T.D. (Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing) graded ballet syllabus. This syllabus combines French, Russian, and Italian classical techniques in a logical progression of learning with a very strong emphasis on technical excellence, musicality, and the creative expression of each student. In addition, all of the choreography taught for the first four ballets of Cedar City Junior Ballet’s productions is the original work of the ballets’ creators with adaptations made by Ms. Mills. Christine’s original works include Hans Christian Anderson’s The Puppet-show Man and the beloved story of Mary Lennox - The Secret Garden. Other classical works in her repertoire include The Sleeping Beauty, Coppelia, Cinderella, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Peter And The Wolf and Les Patineurs. (The Skaters)