The Art of Crossing Cultures

Michelle Vosper is the author and editor of Creating Across Cultures: Women in the Arts from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. She has spent her professional career bringing together artists from opposite sides of the world. For 30 years she lived in Hong Kong where she directed the regional office of the Asian Cultural Council, an American foundation which supports Asian specialists in the visual and performing arts for research and study in the United States. Published in 2017, Creating Across Cultures: Women in the Arts from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan is a collection of biographies of sixteen creative women from the Greater China region, written by a team of journalists, specialists, and scholars in various fields of the arts. She now lives on a farm in northwest New Jersey lives and is currently working on a biography about the distinguished composer, Chou Wen-chung.

Phoebe Hui is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher born and raised in Hong Kong. She is primarily working in the relationship between language, sound and technology. Most of her works defamiliarize, and experiment with, text, image, and sound, to discover new possibilities and to transgress ordinary boundaries. Her recent projects have increasingly relied on interdisciplinary ideas drawn from literary theory, art history, quantitative research, electronics, computer science, and interface design. Hui received her Bachelor of Arts in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong, her Master of Arts in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and an MFA in Design Media Art at UCLA. She presented her research/projects locally and internationally, including Ars Electronica, ISEA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, MIT Media Lab, among others. She is also the recipient of a number of grants and awards, including Yale-China Art Fellowship, Hong Kong Art Development Council Young Artist Award (Media Art), Asian Cultural Council Altius Fellowship, Bloomberg Emerging Artist Award, Hong Kong Art Development Council Art Scholarship.

Candace Chong graduated from Royal Holloway, University of London with a MA in playwriting. She also holds a BA in psychology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and an Advanced Diploma in playwriting from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Besides writing, Candace also translates plays from English to Chinese; her recent translation works include Skylight, The Shape of Things, Betrayal, and Titus. Candace is a recipient of the Best Artist Award (Drama) by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (2010). She was selected as one of Hong Kong’s 25 most inspirational and influential women, and she is the winner of five Hong Kong Drama Awards (Best Script) for Alive in the Mortuary (2003), Shall We Go to Mars (2004), The French Kiss (2006), Murder in San Jose (2009), and The Professor (2014). In 2003 she was also awarded Outstanding Young Playwright by the Hong Kong Federation of Drama Societies. In 2004 she was awarded the Lee Hysan Foundation Fellowship by the Asian Cultural Council, which allowed her to spend 12 months in the United States. Candace’s plays have been translated and presented in Seoul, Tokyo, Macau, Singapore, Shanghai, and Milan. Her latest works include Dr. Sun Yat-sen, on which she worked as librettist and which was presented in the Santa Fe Opera House, and the Broadway Production Chinglish, on which she worked as translator.

 Joan Channick is Chair of the Theater Management Department at Yale School of Drama, where she served as Associate Dean from 2009 to 2017.  She worked previously as Managing Director of New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre and as Managing Director of Theatre Communications Group, a national service organization for the not-for-profit professional theater field, in which capacity she also served as Director of the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute. Other positions she has held include Associate Managing Director of Center Stage in Baltimore and Marketing Director of Yale Repertory Theatre. Preceding her theater career, she practiced securities litigation with the Boston law firm of Gaston Snow & Ely Bartlett. Joan is on the boards of the Foundry Theatre and the Yale-China Association, where she chairs the Arts Committee. She taught for six years in Goucher College’s arts administration program and has been a guest lecturer at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. Joan is a graduate of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and Yale School of Drama.