Biography
I’m in the joint program of EALC and Theatre and Performance Studies (TAPS). My research centers on cultural transmission and the politics of East Asian indigeneity and antiquity in contemporary performance.
Engaging dance and movement studies alongside medical humanities, I aim to combine archival research, visual analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork to ask how anatomical modernity, rooted in biomedical rationalism, has shaped and continues to discipline contemporary performance as a creative process, aesthetic product, and epistemic formation. I’m curious about the “subtle bodies” (borrowing the concept from East Asian spiritual and medical traditions as a counterpoint to the anatomo-clinical body) emerged from media environments such as landscape, language, material life, and cyberspace. My research thus examines how alternative/complementary kinesthetic models and body schemata are composed, conveyed, and contested in the global performance circuit underpinned by interculturalism and cosmopolitanism.
Currently I’m working with oral histories of Yi performers in rural Yunnan, China, to investigate the artistry, activities, and organizational legacies of grassroot ethnic performance collectives in the 1980s-90s China and abroad.
I am also pursuing yoga teaching and somatic therapy trainings, as I believe these embodied practices are integral to research in dance and movement studies, performance theory, and the anthropology of the body.