"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, frequent illness led her mother to place her in dance training as a way to strengthen the body. At twelve, study became systematic. At eighteen, conservatory education in China intensified that discipline and left a lasting physical mark. Those early years formed a dancer under rigor, repetition, and pressure. Over time, that position shifted. Performance led to choreography. Choreography led to a larger interest in structure, ensemble, spectatorship, and direction. The body remained central, but authorship moved outward, from dancing inside a system to building one.
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 Shenyang 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 thesis research examined humanity through Tibetan Buddhism, Daoism, posthumanism, and feminism.
Her performing arts practice is grounded in contemporary dance, but it does not stay within contemporary dance as a closed medium. Chinese classical dance and Chinese folk dance remain active technical and conceptual lineages in the work, alongside contemporary modern composition, somatic inquiry, Tai Chi principles, Tibetan movement research, and cross-cultural performance methods. She is interested in live performance because of its immediacy, its instability, and its refusal to separate thinking from time. On stage, movement is not decoration or self-expression alone. It becomes a way of carrying argument, relation, rupture, memory, and pressure through bodies in public.
This work has taken shape across proscenium, black box, festival, museum, and site-responsive contexts. In 2025, Ash and Bone was presented at Ailey Citigroup Theater in New York, Gibney Dance in New York, and Mark O’Donnell Theater in Brooklyn. Off to On traveled through The Tank NYC, Dixon Place, Ruth Page Center for the Arts in Chicago, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Desire Path appeared at the International Human Rights Art Festival at The Tank in New York. In Between the dusk and dawn was developed through ritual-based contemporary dance at Mark Morris Dance Group in Brooklyn and later shown at Abrons Arts Center in New York. Earlier large-scale choreographic works include ENTROPY, N.U.O, HUNGER, Tamer, Fourth Wound, and one-two-three, created in Tempe between 2023 and 2024 as evening-length, ensemble, and interdisciplinary performance works that moved between philosophy, ritual, technology, and contemporary composition.
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 also 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 in studio settings and as a guest artist, including at Gibney Dance in New York, Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, Hunter College, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her teaching links technique to history, form to context, and studio work to the larger questions movement carries.
Visual Art
Looking began before making. From adolescence onward, painting, sculpture, and fine art held a sustained charge, even before they became part of formal study. Yao did not enter visual art through conventional draftsmanship. The attraction came first through attention, through the long act of standing in front of images and objects, through the density of material presence. In 2019, study and research became more systematic. Later, injury altered the terms of practice more sharply. When the body could not move as before, the work shifted toward installation, performance art, and moving image. The hand entered where motion had been interrupted. Materials, scale, texture, and distance began to carry what the body alone no longer could.
Her visual work is not separate from the performing arts practice. It extends the same method by other means. Installation, text, object, and video become ways of handling evidence, spectatorship, residue, and metaphor. Space is composed as carefully as movement. Viewers are not simply invited to see. They are positioned, slowed, implicated, or held at a distance. Across media, Yao is drawn to the question of how violence, memory, identity, and cultural pressure are made visible, stylized, suppressed, or misread once they enter public form.
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In 2025, Nigaogemao, an installation built 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 inspired by 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, and earlier performance-based visual works including Who Gave Me the Mold? and My Name Is… were presented in Tempe and at Phoenix Art Museum.
Film and moving image occupy another branch of this visual practice. The lens is not used as documentation alone. It is another compositional instrument. Editing becomes a choreographic problem. Framing becomes a question of power and publicness. In 2025, Insert Coin to Play, directed, produced, and edited by Yao, was screened at the Beijing International Film Festival, the New Youth International Dance Film Festival, Compagnie des oeillets MATUVU in Paris, the Wuwu International Dance Festival in China, and The Way Dance Video Art Exhibition in Nanjing. 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. These works move between dance film, documentary, experimental video, and performance-based screen language, but they remain tied to one central interest: how an image carries force after the event itself has passed.
Research and Writing
Research entered the practice gradually, then became structural. It did not begin as an abstract academic layer placed on top of making. It emerged from a more practical pressure: how to describe what a body carries, how to distinguish between surface form and operative logic, how to make claims from performance without reducing performance to illustration. Over time, this developed into a sustained inquiry into decolonial performance studies, ethical stewardship of cultural heritage, action as evidence, and field-portable methods for composition, documentation, and pedagogy.
At the center of this research is a recurring question: when does a micro-sequence of action become publicly legible as evidence, and under what conditions can that evidence remain accountable as it travels across studio, screen, archive, classroom, and field. From this question, Yao has been developing a research program that brings Chinese aesthetic and philosophical resources into dialogue with performance studies and critical dance studies, treating them not as decorative cultural reference, but as analytical and methodological sources. Her work has focused especially on Chinese Aesthetic Philosophical Analysis, Action Hermeneutics, Residual Dramaturgy, and more recent methodological development around RITE–MAP, a decolonial framework derived through research on Chinese Nuo ritual.
This writing and research practice has unfolded across conference presentations, invited lectures, webinars, workshops, and peer review service. In 2025, she presented “Roots to Future: Nuo å‚©, Cultural Heritage and Decolonial Practice” at the National Dance Education Organization annual conference in Detroit. In 2026, she was scheduled to present “RITE–MAP: Decolonial Pedagogy Through Chinese Nuo Ritual” through the NDEO Webinar Series, and “Rethinking ‘Good Dance’: Challenging Ableist Aesthetics” at the NDEO Dance and Disability Virtual Summit. She also presented “Cultural Heritage through Contemporary Choreography” through the New York City Arts in Education Roundtable’s Face-to-Face Conference, and gave campus teaching and lecture presentations at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, including “What Movement Carries: Body, Culture, and the Politics of Form.” Other invited lectures and workshops have addressed somatics from Chinese philosophy, Chinese medicine and Daoist perspectives, feminism in art-making, and movement in relation to sound, aging, and intergenerational learning.
Writing, in this body of work, does not function as a secondary explanation of finished art. It is part of the same compositional field. Essays, lectures, wall texts, artist interviews, and editorial framing are used to test how a practice becomes legible, where translation fails, and what kinds of language can hold complexity without flattening it. This includes scholarly writing, but also public-facing forms. In 2026, excerpts from her text “Spectatorship as Heritage: The Politics of Viewing” were presented as bilingual wall panels in the exhibition BEYOND in Schio, Italy. Her writing and editorial thought also extend through artist-centered publication work in STRATUM Journal and through long-form interviews, essays, and curatorial framing across ELSEHERE’s publishing ecosystem.
Research has also taken an institutional form. In 2026, Yao was invited to serve on the National Dance Education Organization Conference Proposal Review Committee, to review proposals for the Dance Studies Association annual conference, and to join the Dance Studies Association Working Group Mentorship Program, where the focus included practice-research methodology, archival and historical inquiry, and the development of publishable scholarly writing from embodied research. These roles reflect a research practice that is not limited to private inquiry. It also involves field formation, peer evaluation, and the building of shared standards for how knowledge in dance and performance can be argued, transmitted, and revised.
Across these forms, Yao’s research and writing remain tied to one larger effort: to move decolonial performance work from rhetoric to method, and to build analytic tools that can remain accountable to lineage, consent, and local context while still traveling across disciplines, media, and institutions.
Awards and Honors
Recognition has come to Yao’s work through several overlapping fields: choreography, dance film, academic research, teaching, producing, and artist-centered public humanities. Rather than belonging to a single system of validation, these awards and fellowships trace a practice that has developed across performance, visual media, scholarship, and institutional work. They mark not one line of achievement, but a body of work moving between studio, university, festival, publication, and public-facing cultural infrastructure.
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. These recognitions reflect a moving image practice that is not separate from choreography, but extends it through editing, framing, and mediated spectatorship.
In academic and research contexts, Yao’s work has been recognized both for scholarly strength and for its pedagogical reach. During her MFA at Arizona State University, she received the Outstanding Research Award, a competitive graduate college-wide distinction, as well as Teaching Excellence Awards and multiple university scholarships. Her nomination for the National Dance Education Organization’s Outstanding Dance Education Researcher Award further marked the growing visibility of her research within national dance education discourse. These recognitions sit alongside conference invitations, webinar selections, and peer review appointments that together indicate a research practice already moving into public scholarly circulation.
Support through grants and fellowships has also played a significant role in the development of her work. In 2026, Yao was awarded the Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, selected through a highly competitive international process. That same year, she received the LMCC Manhattan Arts Creative Engagement Grant for a Manhattan-based public arts project, the CIPA x ISPA Congress Fellowship, the CIPA Emerging Producers Fellowship, and The Laundromat Project Create Change Fellowship. These forms of support locate her not only as an artist and researcher, but also as a developing producer, organizer, and builder of long-form cultural structures. Earlier fellowships and awards include an Arts Administration Fellowship with BodyStories: Teresa Fellion Dance, an Interdisciplinary Arts Fellowship with Ballet Arizona, and multiple scholarships and graduate assistantship fellowships during her time at Arizona State University.
Her earlier training in China was also marked by sustained formal recognition. 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 both the professional and academic fields. These early recognitions belong to a different stage of the work, but they remain important. They show how long the discipline, pressure, and competitiveness of her formation have been present, long before the later expansion into choreography, interdisciplinary art, and research.
Taken together, these awards and honors do not simply confirm accomplishment. They map the environments in which the work has already proven legible: conservatory training, graduate research, teaching, dance film, cultural production, and artist-led institutional development. They also make visible a trajectory that has never belonged to one medium alone. The same practice has been read, at different moments, as performance, scholarship, pedagogy, editing, curatorial framing, and infrastructure-building.
Alongside her work as an artist, researcher, and educator, Yao has built editorial and organizational structures in response to a recurring absence she encountered across the field. Again and again, she saw artists doing serious work without equally serious systems around them. The work might be rigorous, formally complex, or historically grounded, yet once it left the room it was often forced into inadequate containers: a short bio, a brief project description, a few still images, a grant paragraph, a line on a website. What was missing was not talent or activity. What was missing was infrastructure capable of holding complexity with care.
ELSEHERE and STRATUM emerged from that recognition. They were not conceived as side projects or promotional extensions. They were built as structural responses to the gap between artistic practice and the conditions that allow that practice to be read, contextualized, circulated, and remembered. Both grew from Yao’s conviction that artists, especially those working across languages, geographies, disciplines, and unstable institutional categories, need more than visibility. They need forms that can hold unfinished thinking, evolving methods, and work that arrives before the dominant vocabulary for it is ready.
Yao is the Founder and Executive Director of ELSEHERE, an international art label and cultural platform operating across development, production, publishing, artist support, and cross-border collaboration. From the beginning, ELSEHERE was imagined not simply as a presenting platform, but as a longer structure for incubation, framing, and relation. It was built for practices that do not move cleanly through existing systems, and for artists whose work often exceeds the formats by which institutions prefer to recognize value. In this sense, ELSEHERE is both a platform and a proposition. It asks what kind of cultural structure is needed when the work is still in formation, when it resists easy classification, or when it travels between artistic, intellectual, and social worlds without fully belonging to any one of them.
STRATUM extends this work through publication. As Founding Editor, Yao has shaped it as a journal and editorial framework for long-form artist conversations, research-driven writing, and durable public records. Its function is not merely to publish content, but to give serious practices the time, language, and editorial architecture they require. Where ELSEHERE addresses the conditions in which work develops, STRATUM addresses the conditions in which work becomes legible beyond the event itself. It creates a space in which an artist’s process, method, and stakes can be articulated without being flattened into institutional shorthand. For Yao, this is part of the same practice as choreography, installation, or film. Publishing is another form of composition. It organizes attention, builds context, and determines what remains available once the immediate live moment has passed.
The relation between ELSEHERE and STRATUM is therefore deliberate. One develops conditions. The other develops record. One supports emergence, production, and exchange. The other supports language, citation, and continuity. Together they address a problem Yao has confronted in her own life and in the lives of many artists around her: the distance between the work itself and the systems that decide how work is held, valued, and transmitted. Their shared task is to reduce that distance without simplifying the work in order to make it easier to consume.
This institutional and editorial labor sits alongside Yao’s broader leadership and producing work. Her experience has included arts administration, artist support, strategic media work, and organizational development across multiple contexts, including leadership roles in ELSEHERE and STRATUM and strategic support through Beryl Consulting Group. These are not separate from the artistic practice. They belong to the same field of concern. They ask how artists live, how structures are built, how ideas move across institutions, and what kinds of support make it possible for risk, experimentation, and public life to continue without collapse.
At the center of both ELSEHERE and STRATUM is a simple refusal: the refusal to let serious work remain under-described, under-held, or structurally unsupported. What Yao has tried to build through them is not only a platform for presentation, but an ecology of development, documentation, and relation. In that ecology, publishing is not secondary to art-making, and support is not secondary to vision. Both are part of the same responsibility.
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ELSEHERE was founded in New York as an international art label and cultural platform working across development, production, publishing, and artist support.
STRATUM Journal was established as its editorial and publishing arm, developed between New York and Beijing as a platform for long-form artist conversations, research-driven writing, and durable public record.
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In parallel, Yao has worked across arts administration, strategic media, and artist-facing cultural production in New York, including organizational and editorial leadership, fellowship-based arts management work, and strategic support roles bridging artistic and institutional contexts.