ABOUT PEILING KAO DANCES

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Established in 2013 in Oakland, California, now in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, PEILING KAO DANCES is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. 

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ARTISTIC STATEMENT

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Movement is the core of my work. I believe movement transcends what language offers to our experience of viewing and feeling. Movement has its own narrative and its own emotional expression achieved through the accumulated motion of bones and muscles. The performer’s body is the container that transforms the movement through space and time into something meaningful to individual viewers. I am not interested in creating work that tells viewers how to feel. I trust my audience has the wisdom to interpret the abstractions that I create, in dialogue with their feelings and life experiences. 

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ABOUT PEI-LING KAO

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Pei-Ling Kao is a Taiwanese choreographer, dance educator, and performer. Since moving to the U.S. in 2007, she has been working with choreographers of different aesthetic frameworks, collaborating with interdisciplinary artists, performing and teaching nationally and internationally, as well as presenting original work via her company PEILING KAO DANCES. Pei-Ling is an Associate Professor of Dance at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her research and creative interests are focused on movement improvisation, choreography, bicultural and hybrid movement, and interdisciplinary collaboration. She has received the OVPRS Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research and Creative Work in 2025, the Board of Regents Medal for Excellence in Teaching Award in 2022, the Endowment for the Humanities Award in 2023 and 2018, and a Junior Faculty Research Award in 2018 from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Pei-Ling was awarded a San Francisco Bay Area’s Isadora Duncan Dance Awards in 2012 and was nominated for another in 2013. She was also a recipient of the Lo Man-Fei Dance Fund from Cloud Gate Foundation in Taiwan in 2016 and the MAP fund in 2021.