Meiling Cheng
D.F.A. Yale University
Associate Professor, Director of Critical Studies

Dr. Meiling Cheng was named a 2008 Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Cheng was the only faculty member at USC to be awarded a Guggenheim this year and was recognized in the category of Fine Arts Research that will allow her to devote full time to completing her book manuscript, Beijing Xingwei: Contemporary Time-based Art in China.

Born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan, Dr. Cheng came to the United States in 1986 to study at Yale University, School of Drama, where she earned her MFA (1989) and DFA (1993) degrees in Theatre Arts. She began teaching at USC in 1994 and has taught a variety of courses in theatre history, dramatic literature, contemporary kinesthetic theatre and live art, and visual and cultural studies. Dr. Cheng is a noted performance art critic and poet and has published widely in both English and Chinese. Her first book, In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art ( University of California Press, 2002), received a Junior Faculty Award from Southern California Studies Center and the Zumberge Individual Research Grant from USC. She won another Zumberge Individual Research Grant in 2006 to conduct fieldwork in Beijing for her current book project, Beijing Xingwei, the project for which she received the 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship. Since 2004, Dr. Cheng has published a series of groundbreaking articles in the US, UK and Australia, on performance art (translated as "xingwei yishu") and installation ("zhuangzhi yishu") in China's post-Mao era. She also presented internationally numerous papers on Chinese experimental art, traveling to Singapore, London, Boston, Providence, Chicago, Toronto and New York for her talks. She will be giving two papers on performative photographs and documenting time-based art in Copenhagen this summer.