Valkyrie Yao

Monstrous and Sacred Bodies: Imagining the East in Early Modern Europe
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Valkyrie Yao is an artist, researcher, educator, and founder of ELSEHERE International Arts Nexus. Working across performance, moving image, installation, and critical writing, her practice examines how bodies, images, rituals, and archival traces carry cultural memory across time, language, and geography. Her research brings performance studies into dialogue with ritual studies, Chinese aesthetic-philosophical thought, Buddhist and Daoist cosmologies, and contemporary media culture. It examines how masked bodies, repeated gestures, threshold actions, devotional forms, and image-based spectatorship produce systems of perception, transmission, and historical interpretation. Her work has been supported by the Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellowship, the LMCC Manhattan Arts Creative Engagement Grant, The Laundromat Project Create Change Fellowship, and international presentations in performance, film, and interdisciplinary arts.