SanSan Kwan is a dance scholar and a dance artist. She is the Mary Tu Chancellor's Chair in Dance in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include dance studies, performance studies, and transnational Asian American studies. She is grantee of the 2024 Dance Studies Association Mid-Career Award and the UC Berkeley Letters & Science 2023 Beatriz Manz Faculty Award. Her recent book, Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration (Oxford UP, 2021), is winner of a de la Torre Bueno© Award and an Isadora Duncan Dance Award. She is also author of Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces (Oxford UP, 2013) and co-editor, with Kenneth Speirs, of Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects (University of Texas Press, 2004). Other scholarly writing can be found in TDR, Theatre Survey, Choreographic Practices, ASAP Journal, and Performance Research, among other journals and anthologies.  

 

SanSan remains active as a professional dancemaker. She has performed with Lenora Lee Dance for over thirteen years. Previous collaborators include Chingchi Yu, composer Scott Rubin, and visual artist Jen Liu in the Bay Area, as well as H.T. Chen and Maura Nguyen Donohue, and others in New York City. 

 

SanSan premiered her piece, Two Doors, at the Mondavi Center for the Arts at UC Davis in October 2024 and will premiere a new immersive work called How to Make a Passive Dance in September 2026.