Cynthia Ling Lee

🪔 About

Cynthia Ling Lee is an American dancer, choreographer, and scholar known for her interdisciplinary work that instigates queer, feminist-of-color, and crip interventions in experimental performance. She was raised in Texas by immigrant parents from Taiwan and is of Han Chinese and Indigenous Taiwanese descent. Lee began her dance training in high school, studying Chinese folk dance and modern dance. She later pursued an English major and dance minor at Swarthmore College. After graduating, 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, a North Indian classical dance form, which she began to study, alongside researching the connection between choreography and interculturalism. Lee earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her influential teachers and mentors include Simone Forti, Eiko & Koma, Judy Mitoma, Pallabi Chakravorty, Bandana Sen, Kumudini Lakhia, and Anjani Ambegaokar. Her choreographic work and research explore postcolonial, queer, and feminist-of-color approaches to Asian diasporic performance. She is an Associate Professor of Dance in the Department of Performance, Play & Design at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was previously an assistant professor of dance at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Lee is a member of the Post Natyam Collective, a transnational, web-based coalition of artists of color trained in South Asian dance. Her interdisciplinary performance work has 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). 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 Fellowships, Artists' Resource for Completion grants, Durfee ARC Grant, Swarthmore Project Residency.