As a contemporary dance artist, choreographer, and performer in the Milwaukee and Madison dance communities, my choreographic practice and research are rooted in my cultural identity. I am a transracial adoptee from South Korea. I am utilizing dance as a vehicle to reclaim my Korean identity within both predominantly white performance spaces and in my birth country while creating a bridge to find my place between two cultures.
As a Korean American woman, my voice and story have often been overpowered by featuring and favoring white bodies in dance performance spaces. As an Asian body, my culture is underrepresented and undervalued and is asked to fit the mold and physical demands of a white choreographers’ aesthetics. In one experience, I was told by a former executive director of a dance organization that I should keep my race separate from who I am as a dancer. Having experienced racial melancholia and disassociation, I cannot separate my identity an Asian American dance artist. For transracial adoptees and Asian Americans of non-Western cultures, it is difficult to find communities where they can safely share their stories and find a sense of belonging. Adoptees face limitations in expressing their voices as their racial and ethnic identities and adoption narratives are shaped by societal assumptions or the perspectives of their adoptive families.
Bringing in my experiences as a Dancer of Color, sharing my story became the impetus to develop my personal research and create a dance project explicitly for adoptee dance artists and BIPOC communities. I created two films with my collaborators, director/choreographer Li Chiao-Ping and cinematographer/editor Christal Wagner. “Provenance: A Letter to My Daughter” explores my personal experiences struggling with identity and belonging growing up in the Midwest of America and “결코 잃지 않았다 (Never Lost)” investigates returning to my birthplace in South Korea. Through dance on screen and live performance, I seek to amplify the voices of adoptees and BIPOC dance artists by creating a platform for them to share their stories and unearth who they are through art.
My research explores how transracial Asian American adoptees express their stories of identity and personal experiences through contemporary dance performance. I am working with the theoretical framework that is embodied cultural memory. In my choreographic work, I investigate how story, personal memory, history, ritual, and language become materialized through the body in motion. Through the methodology of autoethnography, embodied storytelling creates a path for adoptees to investigate their identity and autobiographical narratives through movement, enabling the body to discover what memories it holds and remembers, what it reveals, and uncovers what has been rendered invisible to become visible through the biological self. Through the creative process, I develop movement language from personal narrative writing, explore movement practices that translate words on the page into choreographic writing in the body, and construct a conceptual framework that forefronts the dancers’ embodied subjectivity. The artists and I explore questions that encompass visibility, intersectionality of adoptee identity, and excavate our birth stories.
I earned my Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in December of 2025 and my thesis concert, | Out of Place |, premiered on March 29 and 30, 2025. This project was an evening-length dance performance, which brought together four transracial Asian American adoptee dance artists, including myself, to perform as a collective and share our individual stories through embodied storytelling. Two dancers are Milwaukee-based artists, the third dancer resides in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I live in Jackson, Wisconsin.
This project created an inroad to self-discovery for the artists. In my role as a director, choreographer, performer, and facilitator, I studied the stories of the three dance artists and how their experiences have shaped their cultural identities. By engaging in practice-as-research through autoethnography, I expand my knowledge to listen, observe, and understand the perspectives of the adoptees in my community.
I facilitated post-performance talkbacks that revealed the project’s meaningful community impact. Audience members engaged directly with the artists, sharing that they felt deeply moved by the artists’ stories and how the work resonated with their own experiences of identity, belonging, inclusion, and separation and loss. These conversations demonstrated the project’s ability to nurture dialogue across diverse experiences, support empathy, and bridge communities, both on and offstage.
I am developing a new project that carries my previous research forward to collaborate with more adoptee dance artists within and beyond Milwaukee. The mission of this project cultivates a dedicated space for adoptee dance artists to stand fully visible in their identities, center their voices and movement experiences, and honor their stories of identity while creating connections and fostering belonging through dance and performance work. I will produce an evening-length performance that foregrounds the choreographic research and personal narratives of the collaborating dance artists and myself that explores this question: How do we (re)claim space for ourselves between our cultures?
This project will benefit the community through building relationships, connections, and critical discourse about cross-cultural adoption. Growing up, I experienced racial discrimination, endured hateful language, and was the target of racist jokes. In third grade, I made the decision to erase my identity. My family believed it was acceptable for me to disassociate who I truly was; they never talked about it with me. Creating work about identity, reclamation, and developing sense of self is essential to creating awareness and deepening audiences’ understanding of adoptee experiences. My goal is to continue reaching others, who share similar stories and experiences, in order to build community and belonging with one another where we do not have to hide ourselves or feel isolated. This work creates greater representation for individuals who may see themselves reflected in art. In a time when questions of immigration, displacement, and national belonging are at the forefront of public consciousness, this work is relevant to the current events happening in the world today. My project underscores urgency to amplify stories that have been silenced or erased and to create visibility on human experiences that matter.
