Yizhou Zhang

Yizhou Zhang is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, with a BA in Classical Studies and Comparative Literature from King’s College London, UK. Her research interests are in the aesthetics, epistemology, and politics of embodiment and movement, especially the roles they play in the histories of modernism, capitalism and globalization. 

Yizhou's dissertation explores how modernist and avant-garde theatres make sense of “gesture”—the organization of the body into an operational sequence by means of a technologically and/or culturally derived “syntax” (Leroi-Gourhan). She places this inquiry at the intersections of the histories of modernist avant-garde theatre, the scientific studies of movement, and the intellectual discourse of kinaesthetic knowledge. Yizhou's interest in performing “gesture” is motivated by the concern with locating agency in the body’s slippage between an objectifiable instrument and an original point of action and perception. 

As an artist, Yizhou likes to facilitate intercultural collaborations and to combine puppetry, animation, documentary theatre, and literary adaptations. She tells immigrant, feminist, and queer stories, and express forms of oppression in everyday life. She has presented scholarly and artistic works at the NONO Theatre Festival (Beijing), the Canadian Association for Theatre Research, the International Federation for Theatre Research, the Performance Studies International, the International Brecht Festival (Augsburg), and the Symposium of the International Brecht Society.