Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Waeli Wang
By Nichola Monroe ‘27
After a year’s hiatus, Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Waeli Wang (she/they) has returned to the Scripps community by popular demand.
Upon arriving at Scripps during the 2023–24 academic year, Wang’s fierce dedication to students and the dance department earned vocal support for her coursework. In addition to teaching this year, she’s choreographing pieces for Scripps Dances, the Department of Dance’s mainstage show April 17–18.
“Dance has always been a part of my life and how I move through the world. I credit my mentor, Charlotte Griffin, who was influential in my dance studies,” Wang explains. “I love teaching and interacting with students, and dance is a way to hold space and share the movement vocabulary that has been passed down to me.”
Following a year of dancing professionally in Los Angeles, Wang completed a BFA in film studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and an MFA in dance from the University of California, Irvine. Both experiences inform her approach to dance today.
“I thought critically about how we see our world through a filmic lens and learned to draw storylines while experimenting with different mediums,” she says.
Wang’s work explores political, historical, and cultural themes
Storytelling is central to Wang’s choreography, which often explores personal, familial, and cultural themes. Her piece Run, inspired by her grandmother who transported medical supplies into Japanese-occupied territory during the Second Sino-Japanese War, fills gaps in the historical record of the Asian diaspora experience. Run has been performed in Los Angeles and New York, underscoring dance’s political and cultural reach as a field of study.
“A liberal arts education is holistic,” she notes, “Dance is a form that engages not only our artistic and creative minds, but also our physical bodies as we embody history, politics, all of it.”
Wang also uses dance as a space for us to understand and wrestle with more recent phenomena.
“After COVID-19, we had to retrain ourselves to use physical touch. That time of total separation from one another continues to inform what I do in an advanced contemporary and modern classroom—we touch, we share weight,” she says. “We live in a vastly individualistic society; dance lets the collective take care of us and directs how we send that energy back.”
Propelling the future of dance at Scripps
For this spring’s seminal dance performance, Scripps Dances, Wang will showcase a work that grapples with the current political moment.
“I’m responding to and thinking about the language of protest,” she says. “It feels like I’m following in the lineage of Audre Lorde, who talks about transforming silence into language and action. This work feels like a prayer for the fire that is burning right now. I’m excited, and I don’t know what is going to unfold.”
Storytelling through dance remains widely practiced at Scripps, as many students engage with, support, and seek out spaces to do this kind of work. With construction on the new Carolyn Lake Dance Center underway during phase one of the Centennial Plaza Project, there is opportunity to support more projects that reflect critically on how we experience the world through this medium.
“The immense support for dance and the arts on this campus is really unique,” Wang remarks. “It might be specific to this particular moment, but I’m hoping that carries on through generations and different groups of students.”
At Scripps, Wang and dance students across the 5Cs are excited to explore this practice.
“I love it here so much,” Wang says. “There is a deep sense of care and thoughtfulness inside Scripps dance programming, whether you are a major, minor, or not. Dance is for everybody on this campus.”
Scripps Dances will be held on April 17–18, 2026, in Garrison Theater and is open to the public. The event is co-sponsored by Scripps Presents and will showcase choreography from Wang, students, and the renowned Martha Graham Dance Company’s repertory to honor the company’s and Scripps’ centennial. Tickets are available here.