Graduate Student
Dingding Zhao (she/her) is a first-year MA/PhD student in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is supported as a Chancellor’s Fellow. Her
research investigates how contemporary and modern dance negotiates questions of urban transformation, internal migration, and the embodied experience of modernity. Drawing from dance
modernisms and critical dance studies, she examines how movement practices articulate spatial politics and shifting social conditions across twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts.
Dingding’s recent paper, The Station as Heterotopia: A Contemporary Chinese Odyssey, was presented at the 2025 IAIR-IACCP Joint Conference in Brisbane, Australia. She is currently expanding
this work into a broader inquiry on dance theater as a site where mobility, affect, and cultural memory intersect. Her developing research links these movement vocabularies to global conversations on mobility and place-making, exploring how dance remembers, disperses, and reassembles diasporic histories.
As an artist, Dingding works primarily in contemporary and modern dance. While she began her training in Chinese classical and ethnic folk dance, her subsequent engagements with jazz, waacking, hip-hop, and other street-informed vocabularies have shaped her sensibility toward rhythm, gesture, and improvisation. In recent years, she has deepened her practice with Natural Dance Theatre refining a grounded, relational movement language. Dingding’s creative portfolio includes the solo works Walking Fish (2025) and Daylily (2024), as well as the ensemble pieces Dai Blossom (2025) and Aguli (2022), which experiment with fusing Dai ethnic movement with street dance forms. Across these projects, she is interested in how contemporary choreography can reframe cultural memory, embody transitional states, and generate new possibilities for kinesthetic belonging.