James C. Fuller ’10 walks like a ballet dancer, bouncing up on the balls of his feet with each step, even in everyday tennis shoes. In his dancing shoes he is even more airborne, a trait recently celebrated when the Office for the Arts awarded him the Suzanne Farrell Dance Award.

Named for the New York City Ballet’s prima ballerina, the prize is given each year to the student who has achieved excellence in the field of dance. This year that prize goes to Fuller, a senior from California with numerous Harvard dance performances under his belt and a job with a professional company, Ballet Austin, lined up for next year.

Fuller began dancing when he was nine years old after taking part in the San Francisco Ballet Theater’s performance of “The Nutcracker.”

“Companies would come through Orange County and they would need little boys to sort of run around on stage for little character scenes,” Fuller says, “and those were fun so my parents thought, well, let’s try some ballet classes.”

Fuller was heavily encouraged to continue with ballet because of the severe shortage of male dancers in the ballet world. He soon became so serious that he considered skipping college and going straight from his senior year of high school into a professional dance company. “My plan had been to go straight into company” Fuller says. “So college was a big shift.”

His decision to go to college was made when, his senior year of high school, Fuller received a scholarship to travel from Orange County, Calif., to Boston to spend a year training with the Boston Ballet. While living in Boston, he attended Brookline High School and rediscovered his love of education.

“I saw how much fun it could be to be in a classroom where people really wanted to discuss,” Fuller explains. “There was a lot of give and take and exchange of ideas and it was just very exciting for me. I guess at that point I also started to discover modern dance and other ways of approaching dance. I started think that maybe ballet isn’t the only thing of value out there in life and that maybe I should give myself a chance to look around a little bit before I entrenched myself in a career.”

Despite this decision, Fuller still chose to take a year off between high school and Harvard, spending a year dancing as an apprentice for the Portland Ballet. Despite this stint with a professional company, Fuller attributes most of his growth as a dancer to the time he spent performing at Harvard with the Harvard Ballet Company as well as the Harvard-Radcliffe Modern Dance Company.

“All of my experience as a performer I got here,” Fuller says. “I think that I’ve grown tremendously, just having the opportunity to perform every semester.”

This experience will help him next year in his role as a full company member of Ballet Austin, located in Austin, Texas. There, not only will his days consist of rigorous ballet classes, but he will also be performing in the company’s season of classical and contemporary works. Fuller is quick to describe this future employment as normal, despite the fact that it’s far from the average post-college job.

“It’s more or less a nine-to-five thing,” he insists. “It’s very much a standard job, except that it involves a lot of slightly different activities.”

Outside of his upcoming job, Fuller hopes to continue to collaborate with new choreographers, just as he was able to at Harvard.

“One part of the Ballet Austin is that there’s a fairly long layoff,” Fuller explains. “I’d be interested in working with choreographers who are still finding their voice. I feel like in some ways that’s the most fruitful artistic relationship. It’s very open, very malleable.”