Reimagining the Exotic Panel


Julia Rhoads is Director of Dance and Assistant Senior Instructional Professor in Theater and Performance Studies at University of Chicago and the founding Artistic Director of Lucky Plush Productions, a MacArthur Award-winning ensemble recognized for its unique blend of dance, theater, comedy, and socially relevant themes. Her work with Lucky Plush has toured to over 75 venues worldwide, including the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (DC), Joyce Theater (NYC), Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, ODC (CA), Wellesley Center (Auckland, NZ), and Teatro Las Carolinas (Havana, Cuba). Other choreography credits include Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Steppenwolf Theatre, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre, River North Dance Chicago, and she was commissioned to create a work in honor of the Year of Chicago Theater for Art on theMart, the world’s largest digital installation. She is the recipient of an Alpert Award in Dance, fellowships from Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography and Chicago Dancemakers Forum, and her work for Lucky Plush has received creation and touring awards from National Endowment for the Arts, National Dance Project, National Theater Project, and National Performance Network. She is a former member of the San Francisco Ballet and ensemble member of XSIGHT! Performance Group, and received her BA in History from Northwestern University and her MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute Chicago.

Phil Chan is a co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, and most recently served as the Director of Programming for IVY, connecting young professionals with leading American museums and performing arts institutions. He is a graduate of Carleton College and an alumnus of the Ailey School. As a writer, he served as the Executive Editor for FLATT Magazine and contributed to Dance Europe Magazine, Dance Magazine, Dance Business Weekly, and the Huffington Post. He was the founding General Manager of the Buck Hill Skytop Music Festival, and was the General Manager for Armitage Gone! Dance. He served multiple years on the National Endowment for the Arts dance panel and the Jadin Wong Award panel presented by the Asian American Arts Alliance. He serves on the International Council for the Parsons Dance Company, and the Advisory Board of Dance Magazine. He is the author of Final Bow for Yellowface: Dancing between Intention and Impact, and was a 2020 New York Public Library Dance Research Fellow, and is  ‘21/’22 “Citizen Artist” at Manhattan School of Music and Visiting Scholar at the A/P/A Institute at NYU.

Georgina Pazcoguin, aka "The Rogue Ballerina," joined NYCB in 2002 and became the first Asian American female Soloist in NYCB's history after being promoted in 2013. She was most recently featured in the world premiere of "Sweet Gwen Suite" in collaboration with the Fosse Verdon Legacy/NYCC Fall for Dance, honoring Gwen Verdon. Pazcoguin's artistry spans across mediums from her extensive stage repertory at NYCB to being featured on the hit show Fosse/Verdon (2019) as well as the film NY EXPORT: OPUS JAZZ. Pazcoguin has also made a home on Broadway with additional credits including Victoria in CATS 2016 and Ivy Smith in On the Town. Georgina is co-founder — with Phil Chan — of Final Bow for Yellowface, recently expanded into the bigger foundation umbrella of Gold Standard Arts, which raises awareness and promotes inclusivity through sincere representation of all ethnicities in the performing arts. Georgina is also the author of a memoir, Swan Dive: The Making of a Rogue Ballerina, published in July 2021 and available worldwide since October 2021. Beyond ballet, she is a passionate ambassador for The Orphaned Starfish Foundation and Best Friends Animal Society.

Irene Hsiao is the inaugural Artist in Residence at the Smart Museum, a 2020 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist, 2020-21 CDF Lab Artist in Residence at High Concept Labs, and the recipient of a 2020 Peter Lisagor Award for arts reporting and criticism. Her writing on dance, theater, art, literature, and science can be found in venues including the Chicago Reader, LA Review of Books, SF Weekly, Newcity, Chicago Sun-Times, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US, Cambridge Quarterly, In Dance, Dance Teacher, the Chemists Club, and more, with a commissioned chapter-in-progress on contemporary Asian American dance and dancers in Chicago in Dancing on the Third Coast, edited by Susan Manning and Lizzie Leopold and forthcoming from University of Illinois Press. As a dancer and choreographer, she creates performances with visual art in museums, galleries, and public spaces, a practice that includes interaction with visual artworks and experimental engagement with artists, institutions, and the public. She has taught at the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of San Francisco, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, City University of Hong Kong, and National Taipei University of Technology, and currently teaches performance art at Roosevelt University. You can see her most recent project, Translated Vase, on the Smart Museum website that is in conversation with their Porcelain: Material and Storytelling exhibit.

Lisa A. Freeman is Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Character's Theatre: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (UPenn, 2002), and Antitheatricality and the Body Public (UPenn, 2017), which was named the Runner-Up for the Association of Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Book Award, a Finalist for the Theatre Library Association George Freedley Award, and an Honorable Mention for the Joe A. Callaway Prize.  Freeman is the editor of the Sarah Siddons volume for Pickering and Chatto's Lives of Shakespearean Actors series and recently published in Theatre Survey on Elizabeth Inchbald's Remarks for the British Theatre. She is a founding member of the R/18 Collective: Reactivating Restoration and 18th-Century Drama for the 21st Century for which she received a UIC Creative Activity Award. She is currently Second Vice-President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and will serve as its President in 2023-2024. She is currently working on two new book projects: Race, Racialization, and Adaptation on the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Stage and Contemporary Playwrights of Color and the Canonical Stage: Metaphors and Materialities.