I am a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Social Sciences at Humanities Research Council of Canada at York University (Toronto, Ontario).

Broadly, my research connects performance studies, Asian diaspora studies, visual studies, and science and technology studies.

My current book project, Optimized Performance: Race, Aesthetics, and the Asian-White Form, examines the “mixed-race” Asian-white figure within resurgences of race science and eugenics in the twenty-first century United States. Although scholars have long argued that artistic and literary depictions of multiracial people symbolize national racial projects—supporting, for example, anti-miscegenation policies and neoliberal multiculturalism—less attention has been paid to renewed beliefs in genetic race amidst the development of contemporary genomic technologies. I explore this context through the work of four US-based contemporary Asian-white artists, each of whom engages technologies such as direct-to-consumer DNA testing, in vitro fertilization, and social media platforms. Using a combination of visual analysis, discourse analysis, archival research, and qualitative interviewing, I show how the artists’ performances illuminate and deconstruct the Asian-white racial form as an “optimized” figure within resurgent racial scientific thinking. Placing the study of art as central to analyzing revived eugenic ideals, Optimized Performance rejects the promises of racial progress associated with multiracial discourses of the early 2000s, while also complicating emphases on white racial “purity” associated with normative eugenic hierarchies.

This project has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the American Society for Theater Research, the New York Public Library’s Research Fellowships, and the Institute for American Cultures at UCLA. I am a 2019 recipient of the Dance Studies Association’s Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for Graduate Student Excellence and the 2024 runner-up for the Routledge Award from Performance Studies International.