Wenxuan Xue (any/they) is a Boston-based performance maker, dramaturg, independent curator, writer, and educator. Their multidisciplinary artistic practice is guided by grief work that disorients conditions of compulsory forgetting—of one’s own ancestral and spiritual lineages, queer kinships, and abundant relations to the earth. They are currently finishing their PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts University.

As a practitioner, Xue has been developing a ritual performance becoming ancestral mud that stewards their Shaanbei ancestral practices, interwoven with matrilineal papercutting and yangge folk dance (The Orchard Project; Mobius; Danza Organica’s We Create Festival). As an Artist-in-Residence at Pao Arts Center, they have worked closely with Boston Chinatown social workers towards somatic care. Their curatorial practice activates memories and senses towards queer magic, racial reckoning, and spiritual reverberation, including Temple of Our Ancestral Dreams (Pao Arts Center), Spiritual Diasporas (Tufts), SPELLBOUND (AAAS/Foundry), an archive and/or a repertoire (Tufts University Art Galleries), and break/down (Tufts). Their creative endeavors have been supported by Public Art for Spatial Justice Grant and Public Art Learning Fund from the New England Foundation for the Arts.

Xue writing appears or is forthcoming in Applied Theatre and Racial Justice (Routledge), Journal of Artistic Research, Public Art Journal, ASAP/Review, and Tufts University Art Galleries’ an archive and/or a repertoire exhibition brochure. They have taught courses in Theatre and Performance Studies, Asian American Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Their dissertation studies how contemporary queer diasporic artists embody “ancestral placekeeping” in the afterlife of transpacific military, indenture, and neoliberal displacements.