Yutian Wong

Yutian Wong

( She/Her/Hers )
Professor - Dance History and Composition
Dance Advisor (Last names I-Z)
Email: ytw@sfsu.edu
Location: CA 101

Ph.D. Dance History and Theory, University of California, Riverside
B.A. Art History, University of California, Davis

Yutian Wong has been teaching at SF State since 2009. Prior to joining the faculty at SF State, Wong was an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a Mellon Postodoctoral Fellow and Visting Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College. Her research asks questions about how dance objects are created and valued by methodological approaches and disciplinary limits. Recently completed projects include Dancing in the Aftermath of Anti-Asian Violence (2023) and Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader (2024). Wong is currently at work on a monograph titled Dancing in the Archives of Sincerity which examines the cyclical emergence of sincerity in times of crisis.

Teaching

  • DANC 350: Dance Aesthetics
  • DANC/MUS/THA 352: K-Pop
  • DANC/THA 408: Performance in Asia and the Asian Diaspora
  • DANC 430: Ballet and Modern Dance History
  • DANC/ANTH: Dance Ethnography
  • THA 732: Seminar in Asian Performance
  • THA 706: Race and Popular Entertainment

Books and Special Issues

Selected Essays and Chapters

  • “Sincerely Funny or Funny Sincerity: Avatar The Last Airbender and Cosplay Choreography.” In Funny Moves: Dance, Humor, Politics, edited by Marta Savigliano and Hannah Schwadron. Oxford, 2025.
  • “Canonising BTS: FOMO in the Archives of Digital Convenience.” In LO:TECH:POP:CULT: Screeendance Remixed, edited by Alana Thain and Priscilla Guy, 108-127. Routledge, 2024.
  • “Martha and the Swans: BTS’s “Black Swan” and Cold War Dance History.” In Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader, edited by Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Yutian Wong. Duke, 2024.
  • “Asian American Contemporary Dance.” In Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature and Culture, edited by Josephine Lee. London: Oxford, 2020.
  • “Dancing with the (Asian American) Stars: Margaret Cho and the Failure to Win.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition, edited by Sherril Dodds, 453-471. Oxford, 2018.
  • “Remobilizing Dance Studies.” Dance Research Journal 48, no. 3 (2016): 70-84. Co-authored with Jens Richard Giersdorf.
  • “Discipline and Asian American Dance.” In Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion. Eds. Thomas DeFrantz and Philipa Rothfield, 225-246. Palgrave, 2016.
  • “Choreography of Confinement in Body Memory.” Journal of Short Film Studies 4, no. 2 (2014): 141-144.
  • “Artistic Utopias: Michio Ito and the Trope of the International” In Worlding Dance, edited by Susan L. Foster, 144-162. Palgrave, 2009
  • “Towards a New Asian American Dance Theory: Locating the Dancing Asian American Body.”  Discourses in Dance 1, no. 1 (2002): 69-99.

Other Writing