Affiliated Faculty
- Pronouns she/they
- Title
- Associate Professor
- Division Arts Division
- Department
- Department of Performance, Play & Design (PPD)
- Theater Arts
- Affiliations Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, South Asia Studies
- Phone 831-459-2974
- Website
- Office Location
- Theater Arts J Offices, J16
- Office Hours by appointment via email
- Mail Stop Theater Arts Center
- Faculty Areas of Expertise Dance, Disability, Queer Studies, South Asian Studies
Biography, Education and Training
Cynthia is a Taiwanese American interdisciplinary artist who creates embodied art steeped in crip, queer, and feminist of color praxis. She is curious about chronic illness as a form of embodied training that contradicts dance's ableism, finding ways of sharing dance that depart from “the show must go on” urgency of theatrical production, and the creative possibilities of eco-crip embodiment, access aesthetics, and crip care webs. Their 2024 dance film moss time, crip time explores the crip and anti-capitalist wisdom of mosses and has been presented at Root Division’s Crip’ed Ecologies, RestFest Film Festival, Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, and ADF’s Movies for Movers. Current projects in development include the Crip Care Cards, a mail art project that centers art as carework; Scores for Chronically Ill Bodies, a set of movement scores developed with and for chronically ill bodyminds; and Inventory of Joy, an experimental dance documentary film created with Megan Moodie that asks: what if the medical examination, rather than perpetuating traumatizing, ableist projects of “cure,” could create an inventory of embodied joy?
Cynthia’s earlier work explored experimental, queer, and postcolonial approaches to Asian diasporic performance, reflecting her training in North Indian classical kathak and US postmodern dance. Their performance work has toured internationally, including at venues like Dance Theater Workshop (New York), REDCAT (Los Angeles), East West Players (Los Angeles), SZENE Salzburg (Salzburg), Indonesian Dance Festival (Jakarta), Kuandu Arts Festival (Taipei), IGNITE! Festival of Contemporary Dance (New Delhi), and Chandra-Mandapa: Spaces (Chennai). Cynthia was a long-time member of the Post Natyam Collective, a transnational, web-based coalition of artists of color trained in South Asian dance whose work triangulated between art-making, activism, and theory.
Cynthia’s publications include dance scores as poetry in the Michigan Literary Review and QT Voices; solo-authored articles in Feral Feminisms, The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies, Indian Theatre Journal, and Creative Collaboration in Art Practice, Research and Pedagogy; as well as co-authored chapters in The Palgrave Handbook of Queer and Trans Feminisms in Contemporary Performance, Dance Matters Too: Memories, Markets, Identities (Routledge) and Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford University Press).
