IS/LAND is an interdisciplinary Performance Collaborative composed of AAPIA artists and collaborators. Our performances center movement, storytelling, and aesthetics as processes to explore the extensive and diverse landscape of AAPIA lived experience, including an increased focus on optimizing audience engagement through reflection, education, and dialogue. IS/LAND is currently developing, in collaboration with the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, an untitled work-in-progress piece honoring the stories, poetry, and humanity of Angel Island detention survivors.

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Dancers Catherine Hepler (she/her), Chih-Hsien Lin (she/her)

Visual Designers Okyoung Noh (she/her), Chien-An Yuan (he/him)

Sound Designer Chien-An Yuan

Poet Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

IS/LAND Artist Bios

Catherine “Cat” Hepler (mover) is a Polyblacknesian (aka multiracial Black/Chinese/Hawaiian), Chicago based dance performer and licensed dance/movement therapist. Originally from Oakland, CA, Cat began dancing at age three and gained a rich and varied dance foundation. Her movement background includes ballet, jazz, modern, contemporary, contact improvisation, Bharata Natyam, and Polynesian dance. She is currently an ensemble member with Synapse Arts and a co-founder and mover with IS/LAND Performance Collaborative. Artistically, she is interested in somatic movement as a way to embody concepts, as well as the expression of social messages within dance works.

Chih-Hsien Lin (mover) is a native of Taiwan, a mover, choreographer, improviser, registered dance/movement therapist, and Licensed Professional Counselor. She looks systematically at people’s decision-making process and interaction styles through their established integrated movement patterns. Her movement language reflects a rich cultural bearing from traditional Asian ethnic dances and martial arts to somatic modern integrations: contact improvisation, Alexander Technique, Bartenieff Fundamentals, and the Feldenkrais Method. In addition to the last decade of freelance collaborations throughout Taiwan, Chicago and midwest, Chih-Hsien has been a long-term collaborative artist with Khecari, a Chicago-based dance company, which believes in somatic education, practices integrity and equality with all whom they engage, and works to develop the consent and trust to create safe(r) space for the critique. Chih-Hsien lives to embody and support all integrity, authenticity, creativity, and contemplative whole.

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang (writer/poet/reader) is a journalist, essayist, speaker, activist, and poet focused on issues of diversity, race, culture, and the arts. The child of immigrants, she was born in Los Angeles, raised in Silicon Valley, and now divides her time between Michigan and the Big Island of Hawai‘i. Her writing has appeared at NBC News Asian America, PRI Global Nation, New America Media, Pacific Citizen, Angry Asian Man, Cha Asian Literary Journal, Kartika Review, Drunken Boat, and several anthologies, journals, and art exhibitions. She teaches courses on Asian/Pacific Islander American media and civil rights at University of Michigan, and she teaches creative writing at University of Hawaii Hilo and Washtenaw Community College. She co-created a multimedia artwork for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center Indian American Heritage Project online and traveling art exhibition. She is a 2019 Knight Arts Challenge Detroit winner, Marguerite Casey Foundation Equal Voice Journalism Fellow on Poverty, and Keith Center for Civil Rights Detroit Equity Action Lab Race and Justice Reporting Fellow on Arts and Culture.

Chien-An Yuan (sound/visual designer) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator based in Ann Arbor, MI. Yuan runs 1473, a record label specializing in improvisation, electronics, and collaboration. He is also a founding member of IS/LAND, a performance collaborative comprised of AAPI movers, artists, and collaborators. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, NewCity, Salon, ArtSlant, Huffington Post, and WNYC. Past performances and exhibitions include Detroit Institute of Arts, The Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Gene Siskel Film Center, Museum of Chinese in America NYC, Syrup Loft, Zhou B Arts Center, Asian American Cultural Center of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hyde Park Art Center, and Gallery 312.

Okyoung Noh (visual designer) Okyoung Noh (b. Seoul, South Korea) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher who has grown up with a pale glimmer of a capitalist ideology and moved to the United States with the delusive American Dream. She studied at Seoul National University and received professional training in visual art, (critical) pedagogy, and qualitative research methodologies; and conducted 4 studies internationally including one national research project commissioned by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA). Currently, Noh is studying art at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) as the Elsie Choy Lee scholar. Now is currently working as a team lead of the Asian Teaching Artist Exchange Workshop and Joint Project supported by the Korean Art & Culture Education Service and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and co-teaching Integrative Project at the University of Michigan.