About Shiyi Wei

Shiyi Wei is a dance artist and educator working across performance, education, and interdisciplinary research. Her practice is shaped by her early career as a professional ballroom dancer (Latin and Standard) and develops from within the lived realities of highly structured, performance-driven dance environments.

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She has worked as a competitive dancer, stage performer, postsecondary instructor, and adjudicator. These experiences led her to question how technical standards and evaluative systems shape both the lives of dancers and the forms of dance that come to be recognized as valuable.

Her work moves across artistic, educational, and research contexts, examining how dance exists beyond finished performance and how its value is produced through systems of perception, documentation, and social recognition. Through drawing, sound, screendance, and participatory formats, she explores alternative ways of sensing and encountering movement.

Her practice approaches dance as an ongoing, relational form of knowledge, and investigates how educational and cultural structures might expand what can be recognized as dance.