Bio

As a scholar artist, I join my expertise in dance and performance together with my extensive background as an activist and organizer to elucidate the significance and potential of the body in staged performance, social movements, and popular culture. My focus on performing bodies necessitates an attention to the intersecting identities of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, and more, which while not the main subject of my research is always at the core of my analysis. Whether I am addressing avant-garde dance, Asian American cultural critique, vampires, music festivals, street performances, mass protests, or the presence and absence of water in a region, an attention to the political efficacy of moving bodies pervades my work. In other words, I am inspired by what dance and performance can do in the world. My work creates and highlights performances in which alternatives to mainstream discourses are proposed, rehearsed, discussed, revised, and brought into being, however temporarily. Research interests include the globalization of butoh, Asian and Asian American dance, dance and ecology, site-related performance, arts activism, and representations of sex and reproduction in performance and popular culture.