After graduating from National Taiwan University with a BA in literature, the light saber in Thomas Ostermeier’s Nora, the doorframe in Peter Brook’s Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, or the six-hour long play K24 made me determined to take theatre as my research interest. My decision brought me to the U.S and to study theatre and performance studies at University of Maryland-College Park. Sharing most disciplines with sociology and anthropology, performance studies emphasizes performativity more than the written text, and naturally it offers me a new way to examine human behavior. For part of my thesis research, I started to work at a performing arts organization in New York City and gradually realized all the campaigns I created for the organization were really the outcome of the troupe’s strategy and the city’s cultural policy— digitally materializing the theatre’s relationship to the society in one tweet or a facebook post. The curious relationship between theatre as a cultural institution and production of arts—or even the more curious mission as to reproducing consumer relations with a work of art, prompt me to find answers as a researcher and further become a PhD student at Peking University.

Working as researcher, dramaturg, and theatre artist, I then had the opportunity to reside at Yale School of Drama as a special research fellow. During my residency, my play, “Hedda, What Will the Gabler’s Daughter Do Next” was produced at Yale Cabaret Satellite Festival and I was able to perform again as a shadow puppeteer/castor in Turkish Artist Aylin Tekiner’s production “Do All Daddies Have Grey Suits.” With all the experience combined, my current interest is to investigate theatre business in terms of creative industries (CIs)—creative industries is to incorporate the system of signs into Capitalist mode of production, and I am interested in exploring the formation of sign systems and how it is being incorporated (influences such as policy frameworks, network of relationships, organizational structure, marketing strategies, etc.). I am also interested in exploring performance and philosophy, such as theatre and time, and mass performance on a micro level. I am looking forward to sharing more works under the supervision of Dr. Yi Lin.