I’m a theatre and performance scholar whose work bridges theatre history, performance studies, immersive media, and inter-Asian cultural studies. My academic training began in dramatic literature and theatre in English at Korea University and has since evolved into a transdisciplinary inquiry into technology, spirituality, and embodiment in Asian art and performance. I received my PhD in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in June 2024.
I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore and an Associate in the Inter-Asia Engagements Cluster at the Asia Research Institute. I contribute to Archipelagic Mappings and Performance Routes, Routers, and Networks, a research project funded by the Ministry of Education, tracing inter-Asian performance circulations and tours from 1840 to 1975. My work includes collaborative archival research, the development of a digital performance database, and the co-curation of an international symposium that will seed an edited collection.
My first book project, Animating Virtual Reality: Body, Site, and Memory in Global Asian Art and Performance, explores how contemporary Asian artists reimagine VR and immersive technologies through theatrical, spiritual, and philosophical lenses. Focusing on a range of live performances, site-specific installations, and participatory VR artworks, including works by Ho Tzu Nyen, Choy Ka Fai, Hayoun Kwon, Seo Hyun-suk, Koizumi Meiro, Okada Toshiki, and Hsu Chia-Wei, the book develops a theory of virtual dramaturgy grounded in Asian cosmologies, techno-cultural histories, and embodied practices. It traces how these artists navigate and subvert dominant narratives of techno-orientalism, offering instead an aesthetics of permeability—where human and nonhuman, memory and media, spirit and code intertwine. In doing so, the book positions VR performance not as a rupture from embodied theatrical traditions, but a medium that extends and complicates theatre’s long-standing inquiries into presence, subjectivity, and the fragile thresholds of the real.
My research has been supported by fellowships and major grants from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (Theatre and Technology Fellowship), Art and Science Connect program (CUNY Graduate Center), and professional societies including the American Society for Theatre Research and Association for Theatre in Higher Education. I serve as Co-Convener of the Performance and Virtual Reality Working Group at the American Society for Theatre Research (2022–present) and as a member of the Art Papers Review Committee for ACM SIGGRAPH Asia.
Recent publication: I am a co-editor of the special section “VR’s Wild Hope?: The Asian Century and VR Art” (Verge: Studies in Global Asias, University of Minnesota Press, Fall 2025). This section gathers essays on the affective and infrastructural politics of immersive art in Global Asia. I also contributed the Introduction and Coda to this section.
Upcoming works include an in-depth conversation with Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen on the ghosts of war and philosophy in his VR work Voice of Void, titled “choreographies of confinement” (TDR: The Drama Review), and a chapter on Korean artist Seo Hyun-suk’s site-specific VR theatre in the edited volume Mediated Horizons: Technology in East Asian Theatre and Performance (University of Michigan Press), edited by Jyana Browne and Tarryn Chun. My reviews and artist interviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Asian Theatre Journal, and Critical Stages.
→ Read more about my academic publications here
Kyueun Kim 