AADS Fall 2026 Symposium
“Asian American Art and Performance”
How are artists and performers of Asian descent disrupting the art world, including the world of classical ballet? What are current trends in Asian American art and theater? How can we use performance theory to better understand the everyday lives of Asian Americans negotiating state restrictions and surveillance? Asian American Art and Performance is an exciting symposium and film screening that explores new directions in Asian American art, performance, and theater studies.
Agenda
Saturday, Sept. 19, Ruby Lounge, Rubenstein Arts Center, Duke University
10 a.m.: Coffee and pastries
10:30 a.m.: Staging Asylees and Refugees from the Asian Diaspora with Sean Metzger
Discussant: Esther Kim Lee
11:45 a.m.: Lunch and break
1 p.m.: Registration Dramas: Paper Performances and Japanese American Incarceration with Ju Yon Kim
Discussant: Marguerite Nguyen
2:15 p.m.: Archiving performance
A short presentation from Duke Libraries
2:30 p.m.: Break
3 p.m.: Film Theater: “About Face: Disrupting Ballet”
4 p.m.: Panel discussion with director Jennifer Lin
Discussant: Jingqiu Guan
5 p.m.: Reception
Speaker(s)
Ju Yon Kim
Patsy Takemoto Mink Professor of English
Harvard University
Ju Yon Kim is the Patsy Takemoto Mink Professor of English at Harvard University. She is the author of The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (NYU Press, 2015), which received the New England American Studies Association’s Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize, and Paper Performance: Suspicion and Asian American Archives, which was just published as part of Stanford University Press’s Asian America series.
Jennifer Lin
Journalist
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Jennifer Lin spent a lifetime as a reporter before turning to filmmaking a decade ago. During 32 years at The Philadelphia Inquirer, she served as a financial correspondent on Wall Street, a national correspondent in Washington, D.C., and an Asia correspondent in Beijing. Her first documentary, Beethoven in Beijing, explored the Philadelphia Orchestra’s legacy in China and premiered on PBS’s Great Performances. Her subsequent films, Ten Times Better and About Face: Disrupting Ballet, examine the Asian American experience in ballet; both received support from the Center for Asian American Media. Jennifer also wrote a companion oral history to Beethoven in Beijing and published a family memoir, Shanghai Faithful: Betrayal and Forgiveness in a Chinese Christian Family. She and her husband, journalist Bill Stieg, live in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. They currently produce weekly videos about Bucks County during the American Revolution for the nonprofit Bucks County Herald.
Sean Metzger
Professor of Theater, Film, and Television
The University of California, Los Angeles
Sean Metzger is a professor in the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. He is the author of Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (2014) and The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (2020). The latter won awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and the Association for Asian American Studies. The former editor of Theatre Journal (2020-2023), he has co-edited several special issues of journals and several books, including Embodying Asian/American Sexualities (2009); Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (2009); Awkward Stages: Plays about Growing Up Gay (2015); and The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre (2024). Recent accolades include a 2025 Visiting Research Fellowship at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, a 2025 Betty Jean Jones Award for teaching and mentorship from the American Theatre and Drama Society, a 2026 fellowship from the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard, and a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship.
