Na An (安娜) is a dancer, choreographer, dramaturg, and scholar from Lanzhou, a multiethnic city shaped by migration 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 ballet. Her engagement with experimental and contemporary dance took shape in Beijing, where she worked for many years as a performer, choreographer, and teacher with a wide range of artists and collectives. She later expanded her approach to dance-making through interdisciplinary training in dramaturgy at the University of Melbourne before immigrating to New York, where she continued her artistic practice. She is currently based in Riverside, California.
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 a Graduate Representative for the Dance Studies Association.
As an artist, Na integrates movement, language, and objects to explore memory, sensation, temporality, gender, and the shifting conditions of immigrant experience. Her work approaches vulnerability as a site of embodied inquiry, attending to how the body carries and 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.
As a collaborator, Na is interested in artistic practices that emerge through sustained encounters, shared processes, and the continual making of relations. She is a member of the Sino-Japanese Contemporary Performing Arts KOURYU/JIAOLIU Project, a collective of six artists from China and Japan. Evoking intersecting currents of water, KOURYU/JIAOLIU approaches exchange not as a meeting between fixed identities or national cultures, but as an ongoing process of relation-making. Since 2024, the collective has developed and shared its practice across China, Thailand, Japan, and Indonesia. Na also co-curates the Minor Dance Festival in Beijing, which cultivates an alternative artistic community through performances, workshops, and discussions. She also shares a long-term embodied collaboration with Iranian dance artist Negar Kamali.
As a scholar, Na’s research grows out of and alongside her artistic practice. Focusing on choreography, dance dramaturgy, cross-cultural collaboration, and experimental dance practices in mainland China, her work explores how choreographic practice reveals the traces of training inscribed on the body, engages with cultural complexity, and reroutes bodily perception and identity. She has presented her research at the annual conferences of the Dance Studies Association, and her book chapter on dance dramaturgy is forthcoming with Routledge in summer 2026.
© 2026 by Na An