About | Na An

Na An 安娜 is a dancer, choreographer, dramaturg, and scholar who grew up in Lanzhou, a multi-ethnic immigrant city in Northwest China. She began dancing at the age of two and entered professional training at eleven at the Gansu Provincial Arts School, where she studied Chinese classical dance, folk and ethnic dances, Dunhuang dance, and classical ballet techniques. Her engagement with experimental and contemporary dance later developed in Beijing, where she worked extensively as a performer, choreographer, and teacher with a wide range of artists and groups. She further deepened her approach to dance-making through cross-disciplinary training in dramaturgy at the University of Melbourne before immigrating to New York to continue her artistic journey.

Na holds an MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College, an MA in Dramaturgy from the University of Melbourne, and a BA in Modern Dance Choreography from the Beijing Dance Academy. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and serves as the Graduate Representative for the Dance Studies Association (DSA).

Integrating movement, language, and objects, Na creates dance works that explore memory, sensation, temporality, social gender, and the shifting conditions of immigrant experience. Her work approaches vulnerability as a site of embodied inquiry, examining how the body communicates cultural nuances, tensions, and contradictions. Her choreography has been presented at venues including Aratani Theatre (Los Angeles), the University of California, Riverside, BAAD! (Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance), Triskelion Arts, Green Space, Sarah Lawrence College, La Mama Theatre (Melbourne), the Victorian College of the Arts, Beijing Penghao Theatre, Beijing 1919 Theater, and Beijing Chaoyang Culture Center Nine Theater. She was a 2022 Artist-in-Residence at the Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation in New York. Her dance film Room 264 has screened at international film festivals in the UK, the United States, Australia, Chile, Hong Kong, Greece, and Estonia, and received the Audience Choice Award at the 2019 Melbourne Women in Film Festival. She is currently engaged in the Sino-Japanese Contemporary Performance Exchange project.

As a scholar, Na’s research centers on choreography, dance dramaturgy, and contemporary and experimental dance practice in China. She is particularly interested in moments of failure, the marks that training leaves on the body, and practices of refusal, examining how dance-making responds to cultural complexity and reshapes questions of identity. Her work has been presented at the Dance Studies Association Annual Conferences, and her book chapter on dance dramaturgy has been published by Routledge.

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