ABOUT PEILING KAO DANCES

​

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. 

​

​

ARTISTIC STATEMENT

​

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. 

​

​

​

ABOUT PEI-LING KAO

​

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 a Professor of Dance at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her research and creative interests include movement improvisation, bicultural and hybrid movement vocabularies, dance lineages, choreography, and interdisciplinary collaboration.  She received the Endowment for the Humanities Award (2026, 2023, 2018), the OVPRS Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research and Creative Work (2025), the Board of Regents Medal for Excellence in Teaching (2022), and a Junior Faculty Research Award (2018). Her work has also been recognized with a San Francisco Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Award (2012), which includes an additional nomination in 2013. She received the Lo Man-Fei Dance Fund from Taiwan’s Cloud Gate Foundation in 2016 and support from the MAP Fund in 2021.