SanSan Kwan is a dance scholar and a dance artist. She is professor and chair 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 received the 2024 Dance Studies Association Mid-Career 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). Her article on cartographies of race and the Chop Suey circuit, a group of Asian American cabaret entertainers who toured the nation during the World War II era, is published in TDR. Her article, “When is Contemporary Dance,” on contended understandings of the term “contemporary” across dance genres and communities, is in the December 2017 issue of Dance Research Journal. Additional articles can be found in Theatre Survey, Choreographic Practices, and Performance Research, among other journals and anthologies.  

 

SanSan remains active as a professional dancer. She has performed with Lenora Lee Dance for over ten years. She is also currently working with Chingchi Yu and Jen Liu. Previous collaborators include Chen and Dancers, Maura Nguyen Donohue, Scott Rubin, JoAnna Mendl Shaw, and others. 

 

SanSan will premiere her piece, Two Doors, at the Mondavi Center for the Arts at UC Davis in October 2024.