Pei-Ling Kao

Pei-Ling Kao 高沛齡 is a Taiwanese dance educator, dance-maker, and performer whose work explores movement modalities across cultural, disciplinary, and artistic practices. She is the 2026 Nutting Fallingwater Institute Artist-in-Residence. Her research and creative interests include movement improvisation, bicultural and hybrid movement vocabularies, dance lineages, choreography, and interdisciplinary collaboration. At the core of her practice is a belief in movement’s ability to transcend language to expand how we experience, understand, and feel dance. 
 
Kao is a professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She received the Endowment for the Humanities Award (2026, 2023, 2018), the OVPRS Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research and Creative Work (2025), the Board of Regents Medal for Excellence in Teaching (2022), and a Junior Faculty Research Award (2018). Her work has also been recognized with a San Francisco Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Award (2012), which includes an additional nomination in 2013. She received the Lo Man-Fei Dance Fund from Taiwan’s Cloud Gate Foundation in 2016 and support from the MAP Fund in 2021.