OUR PEOPLE

LEADERSHIP

BINDI KANG 亢缤笛 | Resident Dramaturg | bkang@yzrep.org

Bindi Kang is a dramaturg and scholar from Anhui, China, and now resides in Lincoln, Nebraska.  As a freelance dramaturg, she has developed new works with several artists at various cultural institutions, such as Nebraska Repertory Theatre, The Bluebarn Theatre, New York Chinese Opera Society and School of the Arts at Columbia University. She is a doctoral candidate in the Program of Theatre and Performance at CUNY Graduate Center, after receiving her MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. Her artistic interest overlaps with her research specializations, which encompass Asian and Asian American experience and representation in theatre and performances; theories of theatricality; theatrical practices in relation to social movement; performance of everyday life and especially its intersections with contemporary digital culture. She is also a temporary lecturer at University of Nebraska at Lincoln, teaching courses related to history and theories in theatre and performance studies. 

YINING CAO 曹祎凝 | Producing Associate | ycao@yzrep.org

Yining Cao (Vivian) is a NYC-based, Chinese-born creative producer and performing arts manager. She has worked across commercial theater, performing arts institutions, and international stages over the past 5+ years. Her belief is that performing arts can unite people, bridge cultures, and connect the world! Her previous experiences include working at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Thompson Turner Productions, Broadway & Beyond Theatricals, Universal Creative, SMG Live, and more. Her recent producing credits include How I Disappeared at New Ohio Theatre; Two Takes: The Peony Pavilion supported by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; and The Discarded at HERE Arts Center. She is a current Theatre Management & Producing MFA Candidate at Columbia University.

DR. JOANNA CHAN 陳尹瑩 | Co-Founder and Artistic Director Emeritus 

Dr. Joanna Chan is the single living Chinese chosen by the Museum of the City of New York for the permanent exhibition, New York at its Core, on New York City’s 400-year history, which opened in 2016. Her life story as an artist and a pioneer community and spiritual leader is in an interactive, digital display along those of 74 other notable New Yorkers including one of the US’s founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, David Rockefeller, J P Morgan, Fiorello LaGuardia and Dorothy Day.

An honoree at An All-Star Salute to Chinese-American Cultural Pioneers at City Hall, New York City (with July 9, 1993, named Joanna Chan Day in the City of New York,) a city that honored her again in 2013 for her decades of outstanding service to the community through the arts, Chan is a recipient of a Distinguished Alumni Award in 1994 from Teachers College, Columbia University, where she earned her M.A., M.Ed., and Ed.D. degrees, majoring in theatre/communications. A graduate of Chung Chi College, Chinese University, majoring in mathematics, Chan, who grew up in South China, has been a playwright and stage director in North America, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China for over 4 decades, having written, adapted and directed over 70 stage productions. Co-founder/Artistic Director (1970-77; 83-92) of the Four Seas Players in New York City, she was also Artistic Director of Hong Kong Repertory Theatre in the 1980s, and Co-founder/Artistic Director (1992-2014) of Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America in New York City.

Productions written, adapted and directed by Chan include Shakespeare’s Othello; Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; Wilder’s The Match Maker as an opening event of the Hong Kong Cultural Centre in 1989; the musicals The King and I, and Cabaret for the 1988 Hong Kong Arts Festival; the Chinese literary masterpiece, Dream of the Red Chamber, for the 1987 Hong Kong Arts Festival; Raymond To’s Where Love Abides which she directed and took to China in 1987; as well as her own plays reflecting the relationship between Hong Kong and China in view of 1997: Before the Dawn-wind Rises, commissioned by the Hong Kong Urban Council for the 10th Asian Arts Festival; and Crown Ourselves with Roses, commissioned by Sing Tao Newspapers, which, cited by the Asian Wall Street Journal as ‘a tour de force of our times,” toured North America in 1989. The play was included in An Anthology of Modern Chinese Theater as one of 23 most significant works in Chinese theater in the past 100 years, published by Columbia University Press (2010). An English version of Before the Dawn-Wind Rises has been included in An Oxford Anthology of Chinese Contemporary Drama (1997). Her OneFamilyOneChildOneDoor, a black comedy on the human cost of China’s one-child policy, premiered in 2001, and revived in 2002 and 2003, was named one of two finalists in the Jane Chambers Playwriting Contest.

In 2010, Chan was again commissioned by Hong Kong Repertory Theatre to create a new work, Empress of China that received its world premiere in 2011, followed by a Yangtze production later that year. Early in 2014, she directed for the Hong Kong company her 1992 work, The Soongs: By Dreams Betrayed, that opened in January 2014, at the Grand Theatre at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. She just finished a newly commissioned drama, Dai Lo and Dai Lo: The lives and Times of Ho Tung and Chou Shouson, two towering figures in Hong Kong. She is at present working on the 7th volume (of 8) of the collection of her multi-lingual stage works.

A member of the Dramatists Guild of America, Chan was a columnist for Hong Kong’s New Evening Post from 1986 to 1997. She began working in Sing Sing maximum security prison in upstate New York in 2002 in the theatre, Catholic and Chinese Language programs, directing the inmates in August Wilson’s Jitney in 2003; and in November 2006, in the critically acclaimed production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, that was hailed as a work that gave the play ‘one of its finest hours 2,500 years later’ (Michael Millius). Chan was instrumental in helping to free an innocent man jailed for nearly 18 years. An accomplished painter and designer whose works had been seen in solo and group exhibitions in New York, she was a recipient of a Dynamic Achiever Award from the OCA-WHV Asian Pacific Americans Advocate in late 2017, with Nov. 11, 2017, proclaimed Joanna Chan Day in the State of New York.

Chan is also a Maryknoll Sister.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

James Nodroff, Board President
Lu Yu, Treasurer
Fred Filsoof, Board member