Faculty Bio

New York, New York

Valkyrie Yao is a multidisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator whose practice resides at the liminality of performing and visual arts that weave together movement, installation, and moving images, with a theoretical foundation shaped by psychology, ancestral philosophy, and posthuman inquiry. Steeped in Daoist and Buddhist cosmology, their work dissects humanity, reimagines the body as a vessel of metaphor and transformation, and proposes aesthetic languages that decenter anthropocentric worldviews. By positioning symbols within narratives, they complicate fixed notions, traversing cultural traditions, ecological and political entanglements, and symbolic materiality to build sensorial portals toward collective becoming.

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In 2025, their upcoming performances include appearances at Dixon Place Theatre and The Tank NYC in New York City, the Ruth Page Center for the Arts in Chicago, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Their film Insert Coin to Play was officially selected for the 32nd Beijing International Film Festival and received the New Youth Feature Film Award at the 2025 New Youth International Dance Film Festival. The film also won Best Dance Video Art Film at the 2025 The Way Dance Video Art Exhibition, continuing their exploration of dance and cinematic hybridity. They are also invited to be an artist-in-residence with the MATCH Residency at the Los Angeles Dance Festival and the 2025 Choreographers’ Institute with McKoy Dance Project in New York City, where they will present new work at both Abrons Arts Center and the Mark Morris Dance Center. In 2024, their choreography was featured at National Sawdust. Previous works were presented at the Phoenix Art Museum (2022) and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2023). That same year, Yao was invited to exhibit at the XV Florence Biennale in Florence, Italy, further cementing their place in the global art sphere.

Yao’s research has been recognized with numerous international honors. She has been nominated for the Outstanding Dance Education Researcher Award in the 2025 awards cycle by the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) and will present her research at the 2025 NDEO National Conference in Detroit. She received the National Scholarship from the China Scholarship Council, Ministry of Education, for four consecutive years (2018–2021), and was awarded the 2024 Outstanding Research Award by the ASU Graduate Student Government. Yao is also the 2025 Interdisciplinary Arts Fellow with Ballet Arizona. In addition, they are a member of the International Dance Council (CID), which is an official partner of UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – further affirming their active engagement with global dance research and advocacy.

As a true traveler between worlds—both physical and metaphysical—Yao continues to push the boundaries of art-making, embodying a dynamic fusion of cultural heritage, spiritual philosophy, and the complexities of modern existence. Yao’s practice extends beyond performing and visual arts—it is an act of excavation, a reimagining of overlooked wisdom in contemporary forms. Their work exists as a container, a portal, an invitation to step into the liminal, where unfamiliarity transforms into familiarity.