Johann J. Van Niekerk
Associate Professor of Music and Director of Choral Ensembles and Voice
Chair of Music Program (Fall 2024)
Offices & Programs
Education
MM: Choral Conducting, Temple University
DMA: Choral Conducting, University of Washington
BIOGRAPHY
Johann van Niekerk is an associate professor of music at Centre College and serves as the director of the choral and voice programs. He joined Centre College in 2015. A native of South Africa, he completed his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in piano performance at the University of Pretoria and the University of South Africa (UNISA) respectively, and completed an M.M. in Choral Conducting at Temple University, Philadelphia, and DMA in choral conducting at the University of Washington, Seattle. He has served as Choral Scholar at Christchurch Cathedral, Philadelphia, as music director of Rainier Beach Presbyterian Church, Seattle, and Music Director of Trinity Episcopal Church in Danville, KY. He is also the Multicultural Music chair for the Kentucky chapter of the American Choral Directors’ Association (KYACDA). Since 2017, he has been a regular collaborative pianist on the staff of the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts. In 2018 he led the “200 Strong” project in which 200 musicians gathered on stage in Newlin Hall to celebrate the college’s bicentennial.
He has taught courses at Centre College in Afrofuturism in the Arts, Black Music and Social Resistance, Foundations and World Views of Music, Hip Hop Survey, and Issues and Considerations in Hip Hop. He has furthermore taught directed studies in Conducting, Applied Choral Methods, Classical Women Composers and Songwriters and Songwriting/Recording Projects. He is currently finalizing DLM 310 courses on Intercultural Dialogue/Borrowing between Africa and the African Diaspora (abroad), Identity and the Meaning of Home in Ghana (abroad), and The Book of Beyoncé (on-campus).
He serves as the conductor for Centre Singers (auditioned - treble choir), Centre College Choir (non-auditioned SATB), Chamber Singers (auditioned, SATB), and the touring group Centre Chorale (SATB) that travels abroad during CentreTerm every three years, with recent academic/performance tours in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (2018), Spain (2024), and upcoming tour to South Korea (2027). He has led other study-abroad CentreTerms to South Africa (2020) and Ghana (2023, 2026), taught in Austria as part of the Kentucky Institute for International Studies (KIIS) consortium, and will serve as program director for the inaugural "Cape to Campus" semester-long program at Nelson Mandela University in Gqberha, South Africa in the Fall of 2025.
He has presented on various topics at regional, national, and international meetings of the American Choral Directors’ Association (ACDA), Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS), Baltic Studies Summer Institute (BALSSI), Central States Anthropological Society (CSAS), Music, Musical Gesture & Embodied Cognition, (Copenhagen), Music, Research and Activism: Solidarites and Urgencies (Helsinki), College Music Society (CMS), Russian, East-European and Central Asian-Studies (REECAS), and the Semiotics Society of America (SSA).
His current research projects includes work on trauma tourism around the globe, diaspora tourism in Ghana, topics related to Afrofuturism, ecomusicology and sustainability, and ongoing work on the creative output of the Lithuanian composer and painter Mikolajus Konstantinas Čiurlionis and poet-playwright-activist Sofija Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė.