Cynthia Lee

🪔 About

Cynthia Ling Lee is an American dancer, choreographer, and scholar known for her interdisciplinary work that blends US postmodern dance with North Indian classical Kathak. Raised in Texas by immigrant parents from Taiwan, she is of Han Chinese and Indigenous Taiwanese descent. Lee's early training included classical piano, Chinese folk dance, and modern dance. She earned her undergraduate degree in English with a minor in dance from Swarthmore College. Following graduation, she received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which allowed her to study religious dance in Thailand, India, and Brazil. During her time in India, she was introduced to Kathak, an Indian classical dance form, and began researching the interplay between choreography and interculturalism. Lee holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she also worked as a staff member for UCLA's Center for Intercultural Performance's World Festival of Sacred Music. She is a prominent member of the Post Natyam Collective, a transnational, web-based group of artists of color trained in South Asian dance, whose work integrates art-making, activism, and theory. Her academic career includes positions as an assistant professor of dance at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and currently as an Associate Professor of Dance in the Department of Performance, Play & Design at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her choreographic work and scholarly research focus on queer, feminist-of-color, and postcolonial interventions within Asian diasporic performance, as well as the intersections of dance, disability, and chronic illness. Lee's interdisciplinary performances have been presented internationally at venues such as 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). She has also authored numerous publications in academic journals and edited volumes. Awards & Honours: Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, Hellman Fellowship, Asia-Pacific Performing Arts Exchange Fellowship, Taipei Artist Village Residency, NET/TEN grant, CounterPulse Performing Diaspora residency, Santa Monica Individual Artist Fellowship, Artists' Resource for Completion grant (Durfee ARC Grant), Swarthmore Project Residency, 3GT Innovators Series (2017).