"I am a woman of Asian descent. A traveler in search of spaces to create, I am an earth lover, a child navigating the vast ocean of knowledge, and a seeker chasing the wisdom of my ancestors. I am a bold preserver of cultural heritage, a rigorous cyborg, and a soft listener to the whispers of art."
Performing Arts
Dance began early. At five, recurrent illness led her mother to place her in dance training as a way of strengthening the body. At twelve, study became systematic. At eighteen, conservatory education in China intensified that discipline and left a lasting physical mark. Those years formed a dancer through rigor, repetition, and pressure, but they also produced the conditions from which her later choreographic thinking emerged. Performance led to choreography, and choreography gradually widened into questions of structure, ensemble, spectatorship, material, and direction. The body remained central while authorship moved outward, from performing within an existing system toward deciding how bodies, objects, images, sound, and audiences might inhabit a system of her own making.
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Yao received an Art Professional Diploma from Zhangjiagang Dance Academy in Suzhou in 2018 after years of pre-professional training. She completed her BFA in Choreography at Shenyang Conservatory of Music in 2022, then moved to the United States for graduate study. In 2025, she earned an MFA in Dance in Interdisciplinary Digital Media and Performance from Arizona State University in Tempe, where her research brought Tibetan Buddhism and Daoism into conversation with posthumanist and feminist thought. The move into interdisciplinary work developed from choreography itself. Questions first encountered through movement increasingly required other forms: moving image when framing and duration became part of the problem, installation when material and spatial relations exceeded the stage, and writing when the historical and political conditions surrounding performance demanded sustained argument.
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Her performing arts practice remains grounded in contemporary dance, though its vocabulary carries several histories at once. Chinese classical and folk dance remain active technical and conceptual lineages alongside contemporary composition, somatic inquiry, Tai Chi principles, Tibetan movement research, and cross-cultural performance methods. She is drawn to live performance for its immediacy and instability, and for the particular pressure it places on bodies sharing time in public. Movement can carry an argument before that argument becomes language. It can also expose where language fails: in exhaustion, hesitation, repetition, proximity, touch, withholding, and the changing relation between a body and those watching it.
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This work has taken shape across proscenium theaters, black boxes, museums, festivals, and site-responsive environments. In 2025, Ash and Bone was presented at Ailey Citigroup Theater, Gibney, and Mark O’Donnell Theater in New York. Off to On traveled through The Tank and Dixon Place in New York, Ruth Page Center for the Arts in Chicago, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Desire Path appeared at the International Human Rights Art Festival, while In Between the Dusk and Dawn developed a ritual-based choreographic language through presentations at Mark Morris Dance Center and Abrons Arts Center. Earlier works including ENTROPY, N.U.O, HUNGER, Tamer, The Fourth Wound, and 一1One二2Two三3Three established many of the concerns that continue to recur in her practice: ritual, collective behavior, systems of belief, technological mediation, and the unstable boundary between a body as lived presence and a body made available for interpretation.
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Since 2026, the scale and material conditions of that practice have expanded considerably. During the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Northern California, Yao moved further beyond the theater through site-responsive performance and installation. Missing Creature developed as a series of installations in relation to the Djerassi landscape, while Extraordinary Alien joined a fifteen-meter installation with live performance. The residency allowed landscape, weather, material deterioration, and duration to enter the work as active conditions rather than scenery. This period also deepened her work with Xuan paper, water, inscription, bodily action, and forms whose alteration or disappearance belongs to their completion.
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That expansion continues through several longer-term institutional relationships. Yao was selected for the Museum of Chinese in America’s 2026–27 Performing Artist-in-Residence program in New York, placing her practice within a museum context concerned with Chinese American histories, migration, memory, and public culture. She was also selected for the Flynn Breakthrough Producing Platform, receiving $25,000 in commissioning and producing support for THE MOUTH, a new interdisciplinary performance being developed toward a Vermont premiere. In New York, support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council is enabling further production of new interdisciplinary performance work. These projects mark a period in which choreography increasingly operates at the scale of an environment: bodies remain essential, while architecture, landscape, text, sound, objects, and the institutional conditions of gathering enter the composition alongside them.
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Recent work has also returned to language as a bodily and political material. Nüshu, presented through the International Human Rights Art Festival at Queens Court Theater in Long Island City, approaches writing, gendered transmission, and performance through an interdisciplinary ensemble form. PU è°±, developed as a new group performance and concert work for Ailey Citigroup Theater, continues Yao’s interest in the unstable passage between notation and action, inheritance and reinvention, what can be recorded and what survives only in performance. Across these works, the question is increasingly less whether something belongs to dance, installation, film, or performance. The more consequential question concerns what each form permits her to make perceptible, and what it necessarily leaves outside the frame.
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Parallel to her choreographic practice, Yao has worked extensively as a teacher. At Arizona State University she served as Instructor of Record for Contemporary Modern, Ballet, and Contemporary Ballet, while teaching and assisting in courses including The Body Condition(ed) and History of American Hip Hop Dance. Beyond the university, she has taught Chinese classical dance, Chinese folk dance, ballet, and contemporary practice in studio and guest-artist settings, including Gibney in New York, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, Hunter College, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her teaching grew from the same training that shaped her as a performer, but years of moving between Chinese conservatory education and American university dance have made her attentive to what technique silently carries with it: assumptions about authority, anatomy, discipline, beauty, history, and whose body a form was built to imagine. Teaching therefore remains closely tied to the larger artistic practice, a place where form is learned through the body while its histories and demands remain available for scrutiny.
Visual Art
Looking began before making. From adolescence onward, painting, sculpture, and fine art held a sustained charge, years before they became part of Yao’s own practice. She did not arrive at visual art through conventional draftsmanship. The attraction began with attention: standing in front of images and objects for long periods, noticing surface, weight, scale, and the peculiar authority a material thing can acquire simply by being placed before a viewer. In 2019, that interest became more systematic through study and research. Later, injury changed the terms of practice more decisively. When the body could no longer move as it had before, installation, performance art, and moving image offered another way forward. The hand entered where motion had been interrupted. Paper, water, hair, tape, found matter, text, and eventually landscape began to carry pressures that choreography alone could no longer contain.
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Her visual work grew from the performing arts practice without remaining subordinate to it. Installation allows a gesture to persist after the performing body has left. Moving image can isolate, repeat, enlarge, and reorganize an action. Material can stain, tear, absorb, decay, or remain. These differences matter to Yao because much of her work concerns what survives an event and under what conditions that survival becomes evidence. Space is composed with the same attention once given primarily to bodies in choreography, while spectatorship becomes increasingly explicit. Where does a viewer stand? What has already happened before they arrive? What can they see from that position, and what authority do they assume from having seen it? Across installation, moving image, text, and performance, these questions have become inseparable from her interest in violence, memory, cultural classification, and the distance between an event and its later public form.
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In 2025, Nigaogemao, an installation constructed from hair, paper, and tape, was presented at the XV Florence Biennale in Florence. That same year, The Fourth Wound, a Xuan paper and water installation responding to the White Paper Movement in China, was exhibited at Le Petit Versailles in New York through Allied Productions. In 2024, Screaming and Nigaogemao were shown in Phoenix, while earlier performance-based visual works including Who Gave Me the Mold? and My Name Is… were presented in Tempe and at Phoenix Art Museum. Across these works, ordinary and fragile materials acquire force through accumulation, bodily contact, and their vulnerability to alteration. Paper can receive a mark while also buckling under water. Hair carries an intimate relation to the body after separation from it. What appears materially slight can become difficult to dismiss once multiplied, displaced, or given architectural scale.
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A significant shift occurred during Yao’s 2026 residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Northern California, where the visual practice moved beyond the gallery and into sustained contact with landscape. Missing Creature developed as a site-specific installation series across the Djerassi environment, using placement and material intervention to approach absence as something encountered spatially rather than represented pictorially. Extraordinary Alien, a fifteen-meter installation accompanied by performance and premiered at Djerassi, extended this investigation into a scale that required the viewer to move alongside the work. Here, landscape ceased to function as a background for an artwork. Distance, weather, terrain, deterioration, and the changing conditions of encounter became part of what the work could do.
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This period also intensified Yao’s work with Xuan paper, inscription, water, and irreversible material change. In a fifty-meter land-based installation and performance developed at Djerassi, weeks of handwritten language accumulated across a continuous length of Xuan paper before the work entered the landscape. Chinese writing dominated the surface, while English appeared more sparsely as a language of translation, classification, and institutional pressure. Water, ground, movement, and duration subsequently altered what had been written. The resulting work brought an older concern in Yao’s practice into a more exact material form: preservation does not necessarily leave a thing unchanged, and disappearance does not necessarily mean that nothing remains.
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That question now intersects directly with her artistic research. As a 2026–27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow, Yao has been studying how images, texts, classifications, and cultural forms acquire authority as they move across historical and institutional settings. Her research into early modern representations of China, ritual controversy, and judgment at a distance has sharpened an existing concern within the visual work: the image is never simply what is visible. It arrives already framed by systems of naming, collecting, translation, display, and belief. In 2026, excerpts from her essay Spectatorship as Heritage: The Politics of Viewing were accepted for BEYOND in Schio, Italy, where the writing appears as three bilingual English-Italian wall panels. The movement of an essay into exhibition space is particularly close to the direction of her recent practice, where research and visual form increasingly meet without requiring one to illustrate the other.
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Film and moving image form another branch of this practice. Yao approaches the lens as a compositional instrument rather than a neutral record of performance. Editing determines what an action becomes once its original duration has been broken apart. Framing decides what enters visibility and what remains outside it. Repetition can turn an incidental gesture into evidence, while a cut can sever an action from the conditions that once made it intelligible. These concerns connect her moving-image practice to the larger questions of spectatorship and mediation that run through her installations and research.
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In 2025, Insert Coin to Play, directed, produced, and edited by Yao, circulated extensively through international dance-film and moving-image contexts, including the Beijing International Film Festival, the New Youth International Dance Film Festival, Compagnie des oeillets MATUVU in Paris, the Wuwu International Dance Festival, and The Way Dance Video Art Exhibition in Nanjing. The work received multiple awards across these presentations. Earlier media works include What’s Left?, Inches/Centimeters, In Flux: The Bipolar, I SEE, I Don’t Even Know What I’m Looking For, and The Hollow Man. By 2026, her relationship to dance film had also moved beyond making and exhibiting her own work when she joined the Mobile Dance Film Festival as one of five jury members.
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The visual practice now moves between two temporal conditions. Some works depend upon what can remain: an image, a wall, an archive, a length of paper, a recorded sequence. Others are built around alteration, weathering, disappearance, or the knowledge that the material encountered by one viewer may no longer exist in the same state for another. Yao’s recent work stays with the friction between these conditions. A trace can preserve something while changing what it claims to preserve. An image can extend the life of an event while detaching it from the circumstances that gave it force. Increasingly, her installations, films, and material performances begin precisely there, in the unstable interval between what happened, what remains, and what a later viewer is permitted to believe from the remainder.
Research and Writing
Research entered the practice gradually, then became structural. It did not begin as theory added to finished artistic work. It grew from problems that making repeatedly exposed: how to describe what a body knows without treating movement as transparent evidence; how to distinguish a cultural form from the conditions that give that form authority; how to write from performance without converting an event into an illustration of a prior argument. These questions eventually moved Yao beyond the immediate concerns of choreography and toward a broader inquiry into performance, cultural transmission, mediation, historical evidence, and the institutions that decide what can count as knowledge.
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Her earlier research developed through dance and performance studies, particularly through Chinese Nuo ritual, cultural heritage, and the problem of cross-cultural interpretation. This work brought Chinese aesthetic and philosophical traditions into sustained conversation with performance studies and critical dance studies. Concepts including Chinese Aesthetic Philosophical Analysis, Action Hermeneutics, Residual Dramaturgy, and RITE–MAP emerged during this period as attempts to think from the internal histories and conditions of a practice rather than treating Chinese material as cultural content to be placed inside an already settled theoretical vocabulary. Nuo became especially important because it made the limits of comparison difficult to ignore. A ritual action encountered in a village, a state heritage presentation, an archival description, and a contemporary choreographic reconstruction may resemble one another while carrying very different permissions, histories, social authority, and claims upon those who witness them.
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That problem has since widened. Yao’s current research asks how bodies, practices, and cultural forms become legible as evidence and value as they move between different systems of observation and judgment. Who is authorized to describe an action? What happens when an event is detached from the relations that once made it intelligible? What kinds of authority accumulate around an image, document, classification, museum display, or scholarly account as it travels? These questions have brought her research increasingly into contact with media history, anthropology, visual culture, religious studies, and the history of knowledge. The concern with performance remains, but performance now sits inside a larger investigation of how bodies and forms are observed, translated, classified, preserved, and made available for judgment.
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The Folger Shakespeare Library has become an important site for this expansion. As a 2026–27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow, Yao works with early modern European materials concerning China, religious controversy, travel, monstrosity, and cultural classification. Her research places seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century printed sources alongside Chinese and transcultural histories in order to examine how judgment could be produced across enormous geographic distances. Materials including Purchas His Pilgrimage, the 1710 Memoires for Rome concerning the Chinese Rites Controversy, and Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata have allowed her to follow the construction of cultural knowledge through testimony, translation, images, typologies, and competing claims to authority. The archive matters here precisely because it does not offer unmediated access to the people or practices it describes. Its gaps, repetitions, classifications, and visual conventions are themselves part of the history she is trying to understand.
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A related strand of the research turns toward forms whose integrity may depend upon transformation or disappearance. Tibetan Buddhist practices such as sand mandala and torma have sharpened Yao’s interest in the assumptions built into preservation itself. If a form is made to be swept away, dispersed, consumed, dismantled, or allowed to decay, material persistence cannot automatically serve as the measure of successful preservation. This problem connects museum practice and cultural heritage to a question that has long existed within performance studies: what remains when disappearance belongs to the event? For Yao, the question now extends beyond ephemerality. It concerns the values imposed when institutions decide that continuity should mean material survival, and what other accounts of continuity become possible when alteration, transmission, use, and disappearance are taken seriously.
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Her research has circulated through conferences, lectures, webinars, workshops, and teaching. In 2025, she presented “Roots to Future: Nuo å‚©, Cultural Heritage and Decolonial Practice” at the National Dance Education Organization Annual Conference in Detroit. Subsequent presentations have included work on RITE–MAP and decolonial pedagogy, ableist aesthetics in dance, cultural heritage and contemporary choreography, and the politics carried by movement forms. At Hobart and William Smith Colleges, her lecture “What Movement Carries: Body, Culture, and the Politics of Form” brought these questions directly into the classroom. Other invited lectures and workshops have addressed Chinese philosophical approaches to somatics, Daoist thought, Chinese medicine, feminism and art-making, sound, aging, and intergenerational movement practice. These settings matter because they test research against different publics. An argument that works inside a specialist paper may need to be rebuilt when it enters a studio, a lecture hall, or a conversation with practitioners whose knowledge does not originate in academic language.
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Writing has consequently become a practice in its own right. Yao uses essays, criticism, interviews, lectures, exhibition texts, and editorial work to examine what happens when an event becomes language and begins to circulate beyond the conditions in which it occurred. In 2026, excerpts from “Spectatorship as Heritage: The Politics of Viewing” entered the exhibition BEYOND in Schio, Italy as three bilingual English-Italian wall panels. The movement from essay to exhibition is significant to her current research because it changes the status of the writing itself. A text once encountered through reading becomes something spatial, public, translated, and viewed among other works. Questions of spectatorship therefore return at the level of the research’s own circulation.
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This attention to circulation also informs her work as founder of ELSEHERE and Editor-in-Chief of STRATUM Journal of Art, Culture, and the Humanities. Editing artist interviews, critical essays, research, and interdisciplinary work has given Yao another position from which to consider how artistic practices acquire public language. Editorial work requires judgments about context, evidence, framing, attribution, and how much interpretation a work can bear before another voice begins to speak over it. In this sense, publishing has become continuous with her research into cultural valuation. It provides a practical encounter with the very processes of selection, mediation, and institutional framing that her scholarship examines historically.
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Her position within scholarly communities has expanded alongside the writing. Yao has served in proposal review for the National Dance Education Organization and Dance Studies Association, and in 2026 she joined the DSA Annual Conference as a fellow and facilitator of the Tropicar Hub. She has also participated in mentorship structures concerned with practice research, archival and historical inquiry, and the difficult passage from embodied knowledge into publishable scholarship. These roles have placed her on both sides of scholarly evaluation: producing arguments that must withstand review while also reading the work of others and considering what makes a claim persuasive, situated, and responsible.
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What now connects these different areas is a sustained interest in the life of a form after it leaves the circumstances that first gave it force. A ritual enters an archive. A body becomes an image. An eyewitness account becomes historical evidence. A religious form enters a museum. An artistic practice becomes an interview, an exhibition text, or an institutional category. Something is carried forward in each passage, and something is altered. Yao’s research stays with that alteration. It asks who performs the translation, what standards of value enter with it, and how the resulting form begins to act upon the bodies, histories, and practices it claims to preserve or explain.
Awards and Honors
Recognition has come to Yao’s work through several overlapping fields: choreography, moving image, artistic research, producing, and artist-centered cultural work. The institutions supporting that work have also become more varied as the practice has developed, from museums and research libraries to performing arts organizations, public arts funders, and artist residency programs. Taken together, these recognitions follow a practice whose movement between performance, visual media, scholarship, and cultural production has increasingly become part of its public life.
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In film and media-based work, Insert Coin to Play received sustained international recognition in 2025. The film was selected for the Beijing International Film Festival, where it entered the 32nd International Youth Dance Film Unit. It received the Special Jury Prize and Creativity Award at Compagnie des oeillets MATUVU in Paris, won the New Youth Feature Film Award at the New Youth International Dance Film Festival, and was named Best Dance Video Art Film at The Way Dance Video Art Exhibition in Nanjing. Earlier screen works also received festival recognition through Lift-Off Global Network, the Mobile Dance Film Festival, the Student World Impact Film Festival, and other international platforms. In 2026, Yao returned to the Mobile Dance Film Festival in a different capacity, serving as one of five jury members. The shift from having work selected to participating in the evaluation of other artists’ work marks an important change in her position within the field.
Her recent recognition has increasingly extended beyond individual works toward sustained periods of artistic and institutional development. In 2026, Yao was selected for the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in California, where she developed new site-responsive installation and performance works, including Missing Creature and the fifteen-meter installation-performance Extraordinary Alien. She was subsequently selected for the 2026–27 Performing Artist-in-Residence program at the Museum of Chinese in America in New York. These residencies place the work in substantially different settings, from an expansive ecological site in the Santa Cruz Mountains to a museum concerned with Chinese American histories and public culture, giving her interdisciplinary practice room to develop through materially and institutionally distinct conditions.
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A major part of this support now concerns the production of new work. Yao was selected for the Flynn Breakthrough Producing Platform to develop THE MOUTH, an interdisciplinary performance project receiving $25,000 in commissioning and producing support from The Flynn. The partnership extends beyond a single presentation, supporting the work through development, production, and its planned Vermont premiere. In New York, she also received support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for the production of new interdisciplinary performance work. Her proposal for Prospect Art’s 2026 NEW WORK commission was selected as one of ten finalists from ninety-nine submissions. These distinctions are significant because they concern work still being made. They place confidence in an artistic proposition before its final form exists, and provide the material conditions under which that proposition can become a public work.
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Research has developed along a parallel course. Yao was awarded a 2026–27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where her research brings early modern European materials into relation with Chinese sources, histories of representation, and questions of cultural judgment. During her MFA at Arizona State University, she received the Outstanding Research Award, a competitive graduate college-wide distinction, alongside Teaching Excellence Awards and multiple university scholarships. Her nomination for the National Dance Education Organization’s Outstanding Dance Education Researcher Award further marked the circulation of this work within dance scholarship and pedagogy. What began within graduate research has since moved into archives, conferences, editorial work, and interdisciplinary humanities research beyond the university studio.
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Professional fellowships have meanwhile recognized another dimension of Yao’s practice: her work as a producer and cultural organizer. She was selected for The Laundromat Project’s 2026 Create Change Fellowship, the CIPA x ISPA Congress Fellowship, and the CIPA Emerging Producers Fellowship. She is also a Dance Studies Association Fellow and serves as a facilitator of the Tropicar Hub for the 2026 DSA Annual Conference, Speculative Choreographies. In 2027, she will join the Association of Performing Arts Professionals’ Emerging Leadership Institute as a selected member of its Class of 2027. These appointments follow several years of producing through ELSEHERE and publishing through STRATUM Journal, while placing that work in conversation with larger networks of performing arts leadership, research, and cultural production.
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Her earlier training in China was marked by a different, more formal system of distinction. During her years at Shenyang Conservatory of Music, she received repeated National Scholarships, National Encouragement Scholarships, first-prize academic distinctions, and graduation honors at both university and provincial levels, including Excellent Graduate of Liaoning Province. Before that, at Zhangjiagang Dance Academy in Suzhou, she received repeated first-prize distinctions in professional and academic fields. These belong to an earlier stage of her formation, when achievement was measured largely through conservatory discipline, technical training, and academic ranking. Their place in the larger trajectory is still consequential. The endurance and competitiveness demanded by that system preceded the later movement into experimental choreography, installation, film, research, and independent cultural work.
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The pattern has therefore changed considerably over time. Early recognition largely rewarded mastery within established systems of training. More recent fellowships, commissions, residencies, and institutional appointments have supported Yao precisely where the work crosses existing categories: between archive and studio, choreography and installation, artistic research and public culture, making work and building the conditions in which work can circulate. The progression from competitive training awards to Folger, Djerassi, MOCA, The Flynn, LMCC, Create Change, DSA, and APAP records more than an accumulation of credentials. It shows a practice being entrusted with greater duration, resources, institutional access, and responsibility, while retaining the movement across disciplines that has shaped it from the beginning.
Alongside her work as an artist and researcher, Yao has increasingly worked on the structures through which artistic work acquires context, resources, audiences, and a life beyond its first presentation. This began with a recurring frustration. She encountered artists whose practices were intellectually and formally substantial, yet whose work entered public circulation through remarkably thin forms: a short biography, several installation photographs, a grant paragraph, a festival listing. Years of research, uncertainty, material experimentation, and historical knowledge could disappear at precisely the moment a work became public. The problem was partly editorial, but it was also institutional. Who gives a developing practice enough time to become intelligible? Who produces the conditions around work that does not yet fit an established category? Who keeps a record once the exhibition closes or the performance ends?
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ELSEHERE grew from these questions. Founded by Yao and developed in New York as an international arts nexus, it works across artistic production, public programs, artist development, publishing, and cross-border cultural exchange. Its programs now include the New York Experimental Arts Festival, research and creation initiatives, artist development and representation, editorial and publication programs, and international artist support. The organization has gradually moved from an artist-led initiative toward a working cultural structure with its own programs, collaborators, editorial systems, and international relationships. Yao serves as Founder and Executive Director, overseeing artistic direction while remaining closely involved in programming, producing, partnerships, and the longer development of the organization.
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The New York Experimental Arts Festival has become one of the clearest public expressions of this work. Its 2026 edition, Entangled Garden, takes place at Le Petit Versailles in New York and brings together moving image, live performance, installation, sound, and site-responsive work over four days. For Yao, producing a festival involves a different kind of authorship from making an individual artwork. Decisions about site, duration, artist relationships, technical resources, scheduling, communication, documentation, and audience access determine what kinds of encounters can occur. Curatorial judgment is therefore inseparable from practical responsibility. A program exists because someone has built the conditions under which several practices can occupy the same place without being reduced to interchangeable content.
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STRATUM Journal developed from another part of the same problem. Founded and edited by Yao as the STRATUM Journal of Art, Culture, and the Humanities, it is an independent editorial platform for research, criticism, artist conversations, reviews, interviews, and forms of artistic practice that require more sustained treatment than publicity usually permits. The journal maintains an issue structure and permanent archive while publishing work across art, culture, and the humanities. Its editorial scope includes peer-reviewed research alongside critical essays, reviews, interviews and conversations, artist features and portfolios, and public discourse. The distinction matters. An artist interview can establish a durable account of a practice at a particular moment; a research article enters another economy of evidence and scholarly argument; a review records how a work was encountered in time. STRATUM gives these forms different editorial conditions rather than forcing them into a single model of cultural writing.
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Editing has consequently become part of Yao’s intellectual practice. Working with artists and writers requires decisions about what questions open a practice rather than predetermine it, how much contextual framing a reader needs, when editing clarifies a thought and when it begins to replace another person’s language. These are close to questions that recur in her research: who is permitted to describe whom, what happens when experience becomes public evidence, and how institutional framing changes the thing being framed. Editorial work makes those questions practical. They arise in attribution, translation, image selection, titles, sequencing, metadata, archives, and the seemingly small decisions through which a person’s work enters a public record.
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ELSEHERE and STRATUM therefore perform related tasks without collapsing into one another. ELSEHERE works more directly with the circumstances in which artistic practices develop, meet audiences, and enter relationships with other artists and institutions. STRATUM works with the record that survives those encounters and with the language through which practices become available to readers elsewhere. The relationship has allowed Yao to work on both sides of cultural circulation: the event and its afterlife, production and interpretation, the immediate demands of making something happen and the slower labor of deciding how it will be remembered.
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Her recent fellowships and professional appointments have extended this work beyond the organizations she founded. In 2026, Yao was selected for The Laundromat Project’s Create Change Fellowship, placing her in a cohort concerned with community-based artistic practice and cultural change in New York. She was selected for both the CIPA Emerging Producers Fellowship and the CIPA x ISPA Congress Fellowship, extending her producing practice into international performing arts networks. Within the Dance Studies Association, she serves as a Tropicar Hub facilitator while participating as a fellow at the 2026 Annual Conference. In 2027, she joins the Association of Performing Arts Professionals’ Emerging Leadership Institute as a selected member of its Class of 2027. These experiences have given her access to organizational models very different from her own and to the practical knowledge through which artists, producers, presenters, funders, and institutions negotiate what can actually be made.
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The Flynn Breakthrough Producing Platform marks a further development in this trajectory because Yao enters it simultaneously as an artist and as someone already accustomed to producing the work of others. Selected to develop THE MOUTH with $25,000 in commissioning and producing support, she is working within an established performing arts institution on the longer process by which an interdisciplinary work moves from proposal toward public production. That experience carries particular importance for her organizational work. Producing is understood differently when one has occupied both positions: the artist asking an institution to understand a work that does not yet exist, and the organizer responsible for deciding what another artist needs in order to make something possible.
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Her work with Beryl Consulting Group has added another register to this experience. Research, interviews, and strategic media projects have required Yao to work with subjects, audiences, and forms of analysis outside the arts, including technology, investment, and emerging industries. The distance from her artistic practice has been productive. It has sharpened her understanding of how institutions construct narratives around expertise, innovation, risk, and value, while requiring her to translate complex material for audiences with very different forms of knowledge.
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What has changed since ELSEHERE first began is the scale of the question. The initial concern was how to give artists better context around their work. Running programs, publishing a journal, producing festivals, working with institutions, and entering professional networks have made clear that context itself has material conditions. Someone pays for rehearsal hours. Someone negotiates a venue. Someone edits the text, maintains the archive, builds the website, answers the artist, manages rights, raises funds, writes the agreement, installs the work, and decides what remains accessible afterward. Cultural infrastructure is made from these decisions.
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For Yao, this labor has become inseparable from artistic and intellectual life. ELSEHERE and STRATUM are the places where that conviction has been tested most continuously. They allow her to ask, in practice, what kind of institution she wants artists to encounter, how much complexity it can afford to protect, and how its own judgments should remain open to scrutiny. The ambition is consequently larger than visibility. It is to build structures capable of staying with work long enough for that work to develop a language, a history, and relationships of its own.