Half the Sky – Yin Mei Dance

About Yin Mei

Yin Mei is a dancer, choreographer, and educator whose work bridges cultures, histories, and artistic disciplines. She is Professor of Dance and Director of Graduate Dance at Queens College, City University of New York. Raised in China, she was a principal dancer with the Hong Kong Dance Company before coming to New York City through a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council. She earned her B.A. and M.F.A. from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and a M.A. in Media Studies from Queens College.

Yin Mei’s interdisciplinary practice explores the intersection of Chinese cosmology and Western contemporary performance aesthetics and ethics, integrating dance, visual art, installation, live cinema, and sound. Her ongoing research project, The Inner Technology of Knowing, investigates embodied knowledge as both methodology and system, positioning the body as archive, medium, and site of transmission.
She is a recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the Asian Cultural Council. She is a Choreography Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts and has twice been nominated for the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts. Her work has been supported by the National Dance Project, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, Live Music for Dance, the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and other leading cultural institutions.

Her major works include Half the Sky (premiered at Asia Society), City of Paper (Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival), Peony Dreams: On the Other Side of Sleep (La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and The Ringling Museum of Art), Nomad the River (Jacob’s Pillow), /Asunder (Dance Theater Workshop, UCLA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), Empty Tradition / City of Peonies (Asia Society; Jacob’s Pillow; New York City Center Fall for Dance Festival), Farewell My Concubine(Poly Theatre, China), Seven Sages in Bamboo Grove (Hong Kong Dance Company), and Nixon in China at the Théâtre du Châtelet.

Yin Mei is Founder and Artistic Director of YINMEIDANCE, through which she develops and tours her original creations throughout the United States and internationally. She is also founding and leading the first BFA contemporary dance program in China at the Jackie Chan Film and Media Academy at the Wuhan Institute of Design and Sciences.

For more on her work, see: https://www.qc.cuny.edu/academics/dtd/yin-mei-critchell/

Yin Mei Dance

Yin Mei Dance is an interdisciplinary contemporary dance company based in New York City. The company was formed in 1995 and presents a unique dance style employing Chinese energy directions and principles as a means of creating dance works within the rubric of contemporary dance theater.

Yin Mei’s work explores themes of artistic and spiritual significance arising at the intersection between Asian traditional performance and Western contemporary dance. Yin Mei Dance has toured across the USA, Asia, and Europe in venues including Jacob’s Pillow, Yerba Buena, Lincoln Center, The City Center, DTW, La MaMa, Movement Research at Judson Church, Théâtre du Châtelet Paris, National Theater of Beijing and Nanjing, and many others.

Dancers

Marie Lloyd Paspe
Marie Lloyd Paspe is a Filipina-American dance artist, singer, and choreographer, merging ancestral memory and futurity in building worlds. Her work has been presented at national and international venues, including Harlem Stage, Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, and more. She is a 2026 NYSCA Grantee, 2025 NEFA National Dance Project Finalist, and 2025–26 TOPAZ ARTS Resident Artist.

Ching-I Chang
Ching-I Chang is a dance/dream conceptual maker, curator, performer, and listener. Her interdisciplinary work centers subaltern voices and has been presented at Yuz Museum, Queens Museum, MOCA, Harlem Stage, DraftWork and more. She co-directs the Inter-grant Festival and is a 2025 NY Individual Artist Finalist, Create Change Fellow, and 2024–25 TOPAZ ARTS AAPI Artist in Residency.

Jie-Hung Connie Shiau
Jie-Hung Connie Shiau is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher raised in Tainan, Taiwan. Shiau has choreographed works for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, the New Choreographer Project in Taipei, SUNY Purchase College, Little Island Dance Festival, and Summer for the City at Lincoln Center, among others. As a performer, she has worked with companies including Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, Gallim Dance, Gibney Company, and Kevin Wynn Works. She currently performs with Brian Brooks Moving Company, Hélène Simoneau Danse, Robyn Mineko Williams & Artists, Peter Chu’s Chuthis, and Obremski/Works. She was also a Fall 2025 Artist in Residence at Baryshnikov Arts Center, and her dance films have been recognized by Dance on Camera and several international dance film festivals.

Composer / Musician

Christian Frederickson
Christian Frederickson is a violist, composer, and sound designer specializing in performances with live music. He was a founding member of Rachel’s, an instrumental band from Louisville, KY who released six albums on Touch and Go Records between 1995 and 2003 and toured widely in the US and Europe. As a solo artist he has released seven albums since 2010. Frederickson was trained as a classical musician and has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2019.