Susan Van Pelt Petry is a choreographer, educator, dancer, writer, and arts advocate. She attended North Salem Middle School in North Salem, New York, in the late 1960s to early 1970s and graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in Traverse City, Michigan in 1975. She later attended Oberlin College and graduated in 1979 with a Bachelor of Arts in Dance. Thereafter she danced in the Sara Rudner Performance Ensemble in New York City from 1981 to 1983. Petry became a Visiting Artist at The Ohio State University in 1983, staying on to complete her Master of Arts in Dance in 1985 and working as an assistant professor. From 1985 into the 1990s she served as the Artistic Director of The Van Pelt Dance Ensemble in Columbus, Ohio, and was a guest artist at other universities and residencies including the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Taiwan National University of the Arts, and the Cloud Gate Dance Company of Taiwan. From 1997 to 2001, Petry was the Associate Professor at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. In 2004, she became the Assistant Dean of the College of the Arts at The Ohio State University, later chairing the Department of Dance from 2006 to 2015. She resumed chair duties as Interim Chair from 2021 to 2022 before she retired in 2022. Petry continues her work in dance and writing as of 2024.