About Grace

Grace Yi-Li Tong (she/her/hers) is a freelance Asian-American movement artist committed to constructing new realms through performance. As a choreographer and dancer, Grace samples codified dance techniques, everyday motion, and personal physical experiences, in movement collages. This cutting-and-pasting yields performances characterized as absurd, comical, theatrical, hilarious, and mysterious. Collage enables Grace to interrogate aspects of contemporary society such as: erasure and silence, racial injustice, gendered discrimination, exclusion, internalized capitalism, the imposing capital productivity in the human body, the exotification of identity, and more. Academic research into these subjects are often roots of or supplements to her final works. Her performance work collides at an intersection of regular and ridiculous, and she welcomes all to laugh, rejoice, cry, and breathe with her in these newfound realms.

Grace holds a BFA in Dance and a minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her choreographic work has been shown at Battery Dance Festival (2021), at The Craft: Governors Island (2021), in WADEintoACTIVISM’s Festival Against Gender-Based Violence (2020), and the Jack Crystal Theater (2019-present). Grace also collaborated with Tod’s Shoes as a choreographer and performer in Fall 2020. She is currently based in New York City, USA. In addition to making work, Grace is also committed to pushing and changing boundaries encapsulating the politics and physical spaces of traditional western performance through research, activism, and administration.