Candidate's Statement: 

I am applying for the Advisor/Chair of Dance and Disability position because this work already runs through my teaching, research, and artistic practice, and I want to help carry it forward inside a field that still has serious structural work to do. What draws me to this role is the chance to help shape real conditions for change: conference programming, shared language, member resources, and stronger support for dancers, students, and educators with disabilities across the organization.

My vision for this position is grounded and field-facing. I would want to help build a stronger presence for dance and disability across NDEO programming while also making sure members leave with something usable in their hands. Visibility matters, but visibility alone is thin. I would want to support sessions, workshops, and conversations that sharpen how dance is taught, how capacity is understood, how access is built into process, and how aesthetic standards are being inherited, repeated, or questioned. My goals would be to deepen representation in national and virtual conference programming, strengthen the presence of dance and disability in NDEO’s publications and public discourse, and support members with practical tools they can bring into classrooms, rehearsals, and community settings.

My strategy would be steady. I would begin by listening carefully to the committee, to disabled dancers and educators already doing this work, and to the places where NDEO members may want to do better but do not yet have enough language, confidence, or support. From there, I would work to help organize projects that are specific, collaborative, and realistic in scale: curated panels and workshops, resource sharing, member-facing guidance, and stronger bridges between conference activity, committee work, and editorial visibility. I care about follow-through, and I also care about whether ideas stay alive after a session ends.

My service to the field has developed across performance, pedagogy, and public scholarship. Within NDEO, I have contributed through conference and summit programming, including my 2025 NDEO National Conference session and my 2026 Dance and Disability Virtual Summit session, Rethinking “Good Dance”: Challenging Ableist Aesthetics. That work came from a very direct concern: many inherited standards of “good dance” still shape teaching and evaluation in ways that appear neutral but are not neutral at all. They reward some bodies, some speeds, some ways of learning, and some ways of being seen. My work in this area has been to bring those assumptions into view and to offer methods that teachers and artists can actually use, including choice-based participation, consent-based pacing, flexible assessment language, and an understanding of capacity as variable, relational, and context-based.  

More broadly, I work as an artist, researcher, educator, and producer across choreography, interdisciplinary performance, and public-facing educational contexts. My practice has long centered questions of embodiment, power, cultural knowledge, and spectatorship. In classrooms, studios, workshops, and talks, I return again and again to one concern: what does a field reward, and who gets left outside the frame when those rewards are treated as natural. That question is one reason this role matters so much to me.

My leadership experience comes from both institutional and artist-led settings. I am the Founder and Executive Director of ELSEHERE and the Founding Editor of STRATUM Journal, and those roles have required me to build structures from the ground up, coordinate people across different working styles and geographies, manage timelines, shape public language, and keep projects moving from idea to delivery. I have also taught across higher education, guest workshops, and community-facing environments, which has strengthened my ability to lead rooms with different levels of experience, access needs, and cultural reference points. I do not approach leadership as visibility. I approach it as responsibility, pace, and clarity.

I work well in diverse environments because that has been the condition of my practice from the beginning. I was born and trained in China, continued my education in the United States, and now work across multilingual, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary settings. I have collaborated with artists, educators, students, curators, and organizational partners whose assumptions and vocabularies differ sharply from my own. That has taught me to listen closely, name things clearly, and avoid treating difference as something to smooth over too quickly. In dance and disability work, this matters. Diversity is lived through bodymind difference, access needs, training histories, institutional habits, and aesthetic expectations. Good collaboration depends on making room for those realities without losing rigor.

In terms of project management and committee oversight, I would bring a structured, attentive approach. I am comfortable organizing recurring meetings, setting priorities, tracking progress across phases, and making sure communication remains clear when multiple people are involved. I have experience developing workshops, public programs, publications, and interdisciplinary initiatives that require scheduling, coordination, delegation, and follow-through. I would bring the same working habits to this role. I would want committee members to know what we are trying to do, why it matters, what the next step is, and what kind of outcome we are building toward.

I am applying because I believe this position can help move important work forward inside NDEO, and I am prepared to do that work seriously. The field does not need bigger language alone. It needs stronger practices, better shared tools, and structures where disabled dancers, students, and educators are present not only in the room, but in the way the room is being built.