Department of Theatre and Dance

Ph.D. in Performance Studies, Northwestern University
M.A. in Film Studies and Screenwriting, Beijing Film Academy
M.A. in Theatre and Drama Studies, University of London
B.A. in English, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Dr. Kin-Yan Szeto is Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Appalachian State University. Previously, she taught performance studies at Northwestern University and film studies at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Szeto’s teaching and research interests include theatre, dance, film, and media studies; comparative literature; postcolonial and global studies; and gender and ethnicity in transnational perspectives.

A productive writer, Dr. Szeto has over twenty publications. Her writings have appeared in scholarly sources including Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies, Visual Anthropology, Adaptation, Critical Stages/Scènes Critiques, Dance Chronicle, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, The China Quarterly, and Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. She has also written for edited volumes on film and media studies. Her book The Martial Arts Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora, according to the WorldCat database, is owned by over 1,000 libraries. The book analyzes how a unique “cosmopolitical awareness” allows film directors and artists to succeed in today’s transnational environment of media production, distribution, and consumption. She has also shared her expertise with news publications; for example, she was interviewed for a New York Post article, entitled “How Jackie Chan’s Kickass Fighting Style Evolved Over His Career.”

In addition to her scholarly work, she is a stage director and choreographer. She has directed more than fifteen plays, including Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Brian Sloan’s WTC View, Gao Xingjian’s The Other Shore, Stan Lai’s Pining in Peach Blossom Land, and Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice.

Dr. Szeto has received numerous awards and grants. At Appalachian State, these include the 100 Scholars Research Award (2011-2012), the College of Fine and Applied Arts Outstanding Scholarship and Creative Endeavor Award (2011-2012, 2020-2021), the Global Learning and Teaching Award (2014), and a University Research Council grant (2019), among others. Recently, she received a New York Public Library Research Fellowship and is a fellow of both the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Leadership Institute and the University of North Carolina’s BRIDGES Academic Leadership Program.