Yao’s research examines how bodies become legible across performance, ritual, archive, image, and institution.
Working between performance studies, dance studies, Asian studies, ritual studies, visual culture, and decolonial methodology, her writing asks how action carries evidence, how cultural memory moves across forms, and how embodied practices can generate methods of interpretation rather than serve as objects of explanation.
Her current research includes work on Chinese Nuo ritual and decolonial performance methodology, Asian diasporic dance and regimes of recognition, spectatorship as cultural inheritance, and early modern European print culture’s construction of Eastern bodies through posture, ritual gesture, dress, discipline, sacredness, and monstrosity.
CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS
Yao’s current research examines how bodies become legible within systems of ritual, image, archive, institution, and cultural translation. Her projects move across performance studies, dance studies, Asian studies, ritual studies, visual culture, and decolonial methodology, with particular attention to how embodied practices generate methods of interpretation rather than remain passive objects of study.
Her Folger Shakespeare Library Artistic Research Fellowship project, Monstrous and Sacred Bodies: Imagining the East in Early Modern Europe, studies how early modern European texts and images choreographed Eastern bodies through posture, ritual gesture, dress, bodily discipline, monstrosity, sacredness, and visual arrangement. The working article, “Imagined Bodies, Foreign Rites: Corporeal Difference and the Making of the East in Early Modern European Print Culture,” asks how travel writing, missionary accounts, monster literature, and printed visual materials turned foreign bodies into moral, theological, medical, and cosmological evidence.
Her ongoing work on Chinese Nuo ritual develops a performance-based methodology for reading ritual action, spatial organization, spectatorship, and embodied transmission. Rather than treating ritual as cultural content to be explained from the outside, this research asks how ritual itself produces analytic structures: how it organizes relation, distributes agency, and makes memory actionable through bodies, masks, sound, and spatial sequence.
A related strand of research examines Asian diasporic dance, misrecognition, lineage, and institutional legibility. This work considers how diasporic bodies are positioned by regimes of recognition, and how questions of authenticity, ethnicity, and cultural belonging are often settled through visual assumptions before they are addressed as historical or methodological problems.
SELECTED PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS
“Are You Tibetan?”: Legibility Regimes, Lineage, and Pluriversal Accountability in Asian Diaspora Dance
Dance Studies Association 2026
This paper examines how Asian diasporic dance is read, misread, and authorized within institutional fields that often rely on unstable visual codes of ethnicity, lineage, and cultural authenticity. It asks what forms of accountability become possible when dance is approached through pluriversal relation rather than through inherited regimes of recognition.
Nuo as Method: Toward an Epistemological Reorientation of Cross-Cultural Inquiry
Research project / article in development
This project develops RITE–MAP as a methodological framework drawn from Chinese Nuo ritual. It positions ritual structure, movement, action, and spectatorship as sources of theory, rather than as material to be translated into already-established Anglophone performance studies terms.
Spectatorship as Heritage
Research project in development
This strand of research studies spectatorship as a culturally inherited practice. It asks how watching is trained, disciplined, remembered, and passed on across performance traditions, and how spectatorship itself can carry histories of power, intimacy, ritual obligation, and cultural belonging.
RESEARCH METHODS
Yao’s research is grounded in embodied analysis, archival study, visual interpretation, performance theory, and culturally situated method-building. Her work often begins from a concrete performative problem: a gesture that is misread, a body made foreign, a ritual action translated too quickly, an image that turns cultural difference into evidence, or a performance practice whose organizing logic exceeds the field’s usual vocabulary.
Methodologically, she works between close reading and close looking, movement analysis and historical interpretation, field-specific scholarship and artist-research practice. Her approach resists treating non-Western or diasporic practices as examples that merely illustrate existing theory. Instead, she asks what theoretical pressure these practices place on the field itself, and what methods must be built in order to answer them with care.
Across her projects, performance is not only an object of study. It is a way of producing knowledge through arrangement, repetition, attention, relation, timing, and embodied consequence.
WRITING & PUBLICATIONS
Yao’s writing moves between scholarly research, critical essays, artist writing, and creative nonfiction. Her research writing addresses ritual performance, Asian diasporic dance, visual culture, cultural memory, decolonial methodology, and the politics of bodily legibility. Her artist writing approaches the body as a place where memory, loss, discipline, desire, and historical pressure become formally organized.
As founding editor of STRATUM Journal of Art, Culture, and the Humanities, Yao also develops editorial structures for long-form artist interviews, research-driven criticism, field notes, experimental writing, and public-facing humanities discourse. This editorial work extends her broader investment in building durable language around artistic practice: language that can hold complexity without flattening it into institutional convenience.
Her writing practice is therefore not separate from her choreography or cultural production. It is one of the forms through which her work studies how experience becomes record, how record becomes method, and how method can return to the body.
WRITING & PUBLICATIONS
Yao’s writing moves between scholarly research, critical essays, artist writing, and creative nonfiction. Her research writing addresses ritual performance, Asian diasporic dance, visual culture, cultural memory, decolonial methodology, and the politics of bodily legibility. Her artist writing approaches the body as a place where memory, loss, discipline, desire, and historical pressure become formally organized.
As founding editor of STRATUM Journal of Art, Culture, and the Humanities, Yao also develops editorial structures for long-form artist interviews, research-driven criticism, field notes, experimental writing, and public-facing humanities discourse. This editorial work extends her broader investment in building durable language around artistic practice: language that can hold complexity without flattening it into institutional convenience.
Her writing practice is therefore not separate from her choreography or cultural production. It is one of the forms through which her work studies how experience becomes record, how record becomes method, and how method can return to the body.
Writing: Essays, Fragments, Artist Texts
These texts move alongside Yao’s performance and research practice. Written as essays, fragments, letters, and artist texts, they begin from private experience and follow it toward questions of memory, naming, kinship, loss, body, and cultural inheritance.
