Jingqiu Guan (jing-cho), originally from Chengdu, China, is an award-winning filmmaker, choreographer, dancer and scholar. She is currently Assistant Professor of the Practice of Dance at Duke University. Her interdisciplinary practice that spans performance, screendance and documentary, foregrounds embodied storytelling and centers the experiences of women, immigrants, and people of color. Through her work, Guan explores diasporic experience, social and cultural memory, motherhood, and questions of racial and disability justice.
Guan’s dance films and documentaries have screened at festivals worldwide. Her feature-length dance documentary Mama Dancers has won multiple awards in dance film festivals and is currently distributed on Amazon. Her dance film First Dance 2.0 (2023) was a winner at the Dance in Focus Film Festival: Reflections and was presented at the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles. The Weight of Sugar (2021) received the Outstanding Direction Award from Manifest Dance-Film Festival in India and the Best Dance Film Award from Black Lives Rising Dance Film Festival. Her dance documentary Family Portrait (2019) won the Chinese Screendance Maker Award at Jumping Frames International Video Dance Festival, the Best Student Film Award from San Francisco Dance Film Festival, and the Grand Jury Award from Chicago’s In Motion Dance Film Festival.
Her live performance work has been presented at venues such as the Getty Museum, Highways Performance Space, Harvard CAMLab, the Art Center in Carrboro (NC), Shadow Box Theater, and various universities. She is currently developing an evening-length dance theater production that explores narratives of trains and railroads in the context of the Asian diaspora.
In addition to creating work for screen and stage, Guan collaborates with leading dance and theater artists to design visual projections for live performances presented at venues including the Academy Museum of Motion Picture, the Apollo Theater, Brooklyn Museum, with the LA Philharmonic, the Skirball Cultural Center, and universities nationwide.
As a scholar, Guan has published in Dance Chronicle, International Journal of Screendance Studies, Journal of Intercultural Studies, The Journal of Media Practice, Arts, and Education, and contributed to a chapter in the forthcoming book series Women’s Innovation in Theater, Dance and Performance. She holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA, an MFA in Dance Performance from the University of Iowa, an Ed.M from Harvard University, and a BA in Economics and French from Saint Mary’s College.
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