Sissi Liu

Presidential Research Fellow for The James Gallery

Sissi Liu is a Presidential Research Fellow in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She specializes in modern and contemporary performance with a focus on race, sexuality, and gender in the U.S. American and East Asian cultural production across multiple media, including theatre, music, dance, fashion and design, graphic novels, and digital art. Her writings appear in Studies in Musical Theatre, Asian Theatre Journal, Performance and Spirituality, iBroadway: Musical Theatre in the Digital Age (Palgrave, 2017), The Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre  (2016), among others. Her doctoral dissertation is titled Wukongism, or Shapeshifter Consciousness: Kungfu/Jazz and Asian/American Performance, which offers one of the first non-Western conceptual frameworks to examine Asian/American theatre and performance and the (re)making and performing of “Asian” face. Research is underway for her second book-length research project on performing queer and minoritarian fashion. She is a classically trained pianist and composer.