Valkyrie Yao is an artist, choreographer, and researcher whose work spans performance, moving image, and installation, alongside scholarship in performance and media studies. Her practice and research engage ritual, material culture, cultural transmission, and the changing relations among bodies, images, objects, and environments. Her work has been presented across museum, performance, biennial, and international festival contexts in the United States and abroad, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Gibney, and the Florence Biennale. Described as combining high-concept performance art with energetic dance within a minimalist framework, her choreography has been praised for its “fearlessness, ambition and a command of her form” (Viewed Re/Viewed).
Yao’s research spans performance and media studies, ritual and material religion, visual culture, and histories of cross-cultural mediation. Her recent work examines how cultural knowledge moves among embodied practices, material forms, images, texts, and institutions, and how these movements shape the ways practices are interpreted, valued, and transmitted. She is a 2026–27 Folger Institute Research Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where her research extends these concerns into early modern histories of China, print, translation, and cultural judgment.
Yao is the Founder and Executive Director of ELSEHERE International Arts Nexus and the Founding Editor of STRATUM Journal of Art, Culture, and the Humanities. Her work has received fellowships, grants, and institutional support from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The Laundromat Project. She is a member of the 2027 Emerging Leadership Institute cohort of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) and was a 2026 CIPA × International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA) Congress Fellow. Yao received her BFA in Choreography from Shenyang Conservatory of Music and her MFA in Dance, with a concentration in Interdisciplinary Digital Media and Performance, with distinction, from Arizona State University.