performance scholar/educator/dramaturg
Based in Singapore (2025). Assistant Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).
about me
My name is Cheng Nien Yuan 郑念元 (she/her/hers). Most people call me Nien. Previously based in Sydney and Budapest, I’m now researching, writing, teaching, and making performance in my home country Singapore. I obtained my PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney in 2020, under the International Postgraduate Research Scholarship and the Australian Postgraduate Award. This thesis is the recipient of the 2021 John Legge Prize for best 2020 thesis in Asian Studies in Australia. In 2025, I published my first monograph, The Storytelling State: Performing Lives in Singapore (2025) with the University of Hawai’i Press.
My research and practice spans the broad spectrum of performance, including but not limited to Singaporean theatre, carnivals, digital and new media technologies and inter/cultural theatre. I divide this work into three diverse interdisciplinary portfolios that nonetheless intersect with and support one another: life history-telling as performance and performative, dramaturgy and creative praxis in theatre-making, and decentering the field of Theatre and Performance Studies.