About

Michelle Yeh | 葉以安 is a transnational Hoklo-Hakka-Taiwanese dance-theatre maker, writer, movement researcher, martial arts practitioner and storyteller. Her work fumbles with the messiness of intercultural identity, diasporic displacement, colonial grief, and intergenerational healing. She meddles with language, translation and embodiment in an effort to disinter fragmented colonial narratives of her ancestors, carving out communal spaces to heal collective legacies of cultural erasure. As a storyteller, she uses autobiography as a springboard for invention and fantasy, mixing history, mythology and ritual to weave performances dedicated to availing story as knowledge and bodies as archive and witness. Her current work sits with Taiwanese immigration/emigration and land-based narratives, probing the tension between and integration of diaspora and indigeneity. She is a recipient of the J Yang Scholarship, Taiwan Studies Lectureship Fellowship, Edna & Yu-shan Han Award, and Stone and Kimiko Lin Award.

Michelle, a dual Taiwanese/American citizen and anchor baby raised in Taipei, began her movement training with Cloud Gate Dance Theater prior to moving to the United States for her undergraduate studies. She received her BA in Comparative Literature, with minors in Dance and Creative Writing (screenwriting) from Princeton University. During her studies she was awarded the Eric Pai Asian American Research Fund, Sam Hutton Fund for the Arts and the Outstanding Senior Thesis Award in Dance for her multimedia evening-length dance-theater choreographic senior thesis, An Etymology of Driftwood. She has worked with notable artists and choreographers, such as Olivier Tarpaga, Dean Moss, Julie Tolentino, and Francesca Harper and has performed in works by Ohad Naharin, Crystal Pite, Zvi Gotheiner, and Shannon Gillen. Other performance credits include, Sarah Fdili Alaoui, Jimena Paz and Attack Theatre.