A voice:
As a queer Chinese immigrant artist-scholar, my life and work have been shaped by navigating different cultural and educational environments. Growing up in China, I discovered the transformative power of movement as a way to communicate beyond language and borders. At the age of twenty, I relocated to the United States, experiencing life across different cultural, political, and educational environments.
I was often confronted with exclusion, stereotyping, and invisibility. These experiences—being told either that all Chinese dancers look the same or that I am not Chinese enough—first pushed me to question who defines value, knowledge, and belonging. Those questions continue to shape my work as an artist, educator, and researcher.
At the core of my teaching is the belief that dance is a social, political, and cultural art form, not simply a physical practice. I encourage students to question how we understand technique, artistry, culture, and knowledge while creating space for multiple movement traditions and ways of learning.
At the University of Dayton, where I was the only full-time dance faculty member, I helped lead curricular changes that expanded the program’s cultural reach and accessibility. I developed courses that introduced students to global dance practices, dance technology, and broader questions of culture, identity, and representation. At the University of Alabama, I continued developing my work as an educator through teaching, mentoring students, choreographing, directing productions, and collaborating across the department.
Beyond teaching, my creative practice explores the intersections of performance, media, cultural identity, and interdisciplinary work. I am especially interested in how movement, film, photography, sound, and visual design can work together to communicate ideas that are difficult to express through language alone. I believe that the performing arts can serve as a tool for social change.
My dance film 劫 / Self-Deconstruction explores the internal experience of mental disorders through duality, using screendance to blur the boundaries between reality and an internal world that others may not be able to see. The film received multiple awards, including Best Experimental Film at the Hong Kong World Film Festival in 2022. My other film, Filtered Realities, which addresses unrealistic beauty standards and mental health, was nominated for the 2025 Columbus Film, Author and Photography Festival Champion for Change Award.
My choreography A Touch of Zen bridges Chinese philosophy and contemporary dance practice and contributed to my receiving the Ohio Federation of Music Clubs’ Dance Award through the University of Dayton.
Collaboration and leadership have also been central to my academic and artistic work. At the University of Dayton, I served as Artistic Director of the University of Dayton Dance Ensemble, directed the department’s seasonal large-scale productions, co-chaired the Theatre, Dance, and Performance Technology Program’s Marketing Committee, contributed to the development of a new Musical Theatre concentration, and helped revise the dance curriculum.
At the University of Alabama, I served as Artistic Director for the Emerging Choreographers’ Showcase, supported guest artist and repertory work, participated in B.A. Dance auditions, served on the Department Chair Search Committee and Scholarship Committee, and mentored student projects for the Dance Alabama! Film Festival. Before entering higher education, I also taught and choreographed in K–12 and studio settings in California, where my students received recognition and national awards for their performance and competition work.
My service also extends beyond my home institutions. I served on the 2025 Dance Studies Association Program Committee, contributing to proposal review and panel development, and have also served as a juror and judge for the 2024 Utah Dance Film Festival and the Student World Impact Film Festival, evaluating creative work and supporting emerging artists and filmmakers.
Across these experiences, my work continues to move between teaching, choreography, film, scholarship, leadership, and service. Each has shaped the way I understand the relationship between art, education, culture, and community. I see these parts of my practice as interconnected—different ways of creating, questioning, communicating, and making space for perspectives that have too often remained at the margins.
The Roots:
Crossing cultural and linguistic borders taught me that diversity is not simply about representation—it is about transformation: transforming the conditions that silence, exclude, or flatten complexity. My commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion extends through my teaching, research, creative work, and service. I view inclusion as an active, ongoing process that demands curiosity, accountability, and collaboration. Across institutions, I have worked to create spaces that support underrepresented voices, equitable access, and cross-cultural understanding.
At the University of Dayton, I led major curricular revisions that expanded the program’s cultural reach and accessibility. I developed courses that emphasized global movement practices, dance technology, and social justice frameworks. I also designed and taught the Inclusive and Neurodiverse Summer Dance Camp, serving both youth and adults with special needs. Through adaptive lesson planning, sound and visual sequencing, and game-based learning, I fostered a creative environment rooted in joy, agency, and acceptance.
At the University of Alabama, I mentor graduate teaching assistants in inclusive pedagogy, guide undergraduate students in creative research, and support equitable hiring as part of the department chair search committee. I direct student concerts that emphasize collaboration between dancers, designers, and faculty, cultivating shared responsibility and creative leadership.
My creative work reflects the same commitment to inclusion and representation. Projects such as Filtered Realities, A Touch of Zen, and At the Table use choreography and media to explore identity, queerness, and mental health through cultural and feminist frameworks. These works challenge stereotypes, resist cultural hierarchies, and create spaces for marginalized narratives to be seen and valued.
Beyond my home institutions, I continue to advocate for equity through national service. As a member of the 2025 Dance Studies Association Program Committee, I participate in panel curation, proposal review, and broader conversations about representation in dance scholarship. At Dayton, I co-chaired the Theatre, Dance, and Performance Technology Program’s Marketing Committee, developed a new Musical Theatre concentration, and revised the dance curriculum to include more global perspectives. As a member of the Women of Color Collective, I worked to support mentorship, wellness, and professional growth for women of color across campus.
Inclusion, for me, is a living practice—embodied, relational, and continually evolving. Whether in the studio, classroom, or institution, I aim to build spaces that honor difference as a source of creativity and strength. Through dance, I strive to make belonging visible, transforming how we move, see, and learn together.
Questioning
My research begins with questions about how knowledge is constructed, valued, and legitimized within dance education. My early work focused on representation and the inclusion of non-Western perspectives in dance curricula. Over time, however, I began to question whether inclusion alone is enough. I became increasingly interested in why certain dance forms, movement practices, and ways of knowing are treated as neutral or universal in higher education, while others are treated as secondary, cultural, or outside the norm.
Chinese dance has been one important site through which I have explored these questions. Over the years, I have heard that Chinese dancers “all move the same,” that my own movement was “not Chinese enough,” or that culturally specific approaches needed to be translated through Western frameworks before they could be understood. Those contradictions pushed me to ask not only what we teach, but how we have learned to decide what counts as technique, artistry, knowledge, authenticity, and legitimacy in dance.
My experiences as faculty expanded these questions beyond my own classroom. At the University of Dayton, I had opportunities to develop new courses and participate directly in curricular change. Much of my early thinking centered on what I could change as an individual educator: what I taught, how I taught it, and how I could better serve students. Teaching at the University of Alabama pushed me to think more critically about the limits of individual faculty action and the ways departments and institutions shape what is possible in the classroom. Curriculum, assessment, policy, organizational culture, and institutional priorities all influence the educational experiences faculty are ultimately able to create.
My published article, “An Autoethnography: Teaching Chinese Contemporary Dance as a Catalyst for Inclusive Dance Studies,” grew from my experiences as a Chinese international student and educator navigating Eurocentric dance academia. Through autoethnography, I examined cultural representation, stereotyping, cross-cultural exchange, and the positioning of Chinese contemporary dance within U.S. higher education. That work began with a question of inclusion: how can non-Western dance perspectives be meaningfully brought into dance studies? My research has since expanded toward a broader question: what happens when the structures through which knowledge is taught and evaluated remain unchanged?
My scholarship has since expanded across interdisciplinary performance research, cultural studies, institutional inquiry, and practice-as-research. My current manuscript, Interweaving Time and Tradition: The Narrative Poetics of A Tapestry of a Legendary Land and the Global Influence, examines Chinese cultural memory, visual aesthetics, philosophy, dance, and interdisciplinary performance across stage and film, while also considering how Chinese dance is represented and received within global contexts.
My collaborative manuscript, “At the Table: Authenticity, Vulnerability, and Vocation,” developed for Studies in Vocation and Calling, extends my research into questions of creative practice, mentorship, institutional precarity, identity, and vocation in higher education. Drawing from our experiences as artists and educators during a period of institutional uncertainty, the work considers how creative practice can become a way of processing, questioning, and responding to larger institutional conditions.
My practice-as-research project 五行·形 / Forms extends this interdisciplinary approach through artistic creation. Drawing from the Chinese Five Elements—Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water—I explore how a cultural and philosophical framework can shape movement, bodies, environment, sound, and visual composition. The project developed into both a dance film and a research paper presented at the 2026 Popular Culture Association Conference, allowing creative practice and written scholarship to inform one another.
Together, these projects reflect an increasingly interdisciplinary research practice. I move among autoethnography, cultural and performance analysis, institutional inquiry, and practice-as-research, using both written and embodied forms to investigate how cultural knowledge, educational structures, and artistic practice produce meaning.
My doctoral studies, I am increasingly interested in bringing these areas together through questions of curriculum, assessment, institutional structures, and educational change. While dance remains the primary context of my work, the questions that drive my research are becoming broader: How do educational systems determine what knowledge matters? How do those assumptions become embedded in curriculum and assessment? What can individual educators change, and what requires structural change? And how might educational institutions create space for multiple ways of knowing, moving, creating, and learning without requiring one to function as the universal standard?
mained at the margins.
Based in New York, NY, USA