Zelia ZZ TAN 谭之卓

Zelia ZZ Tan is a choreographer, director, media artist, and researcher working across dance, performance, and emerging technologies. Based between Los Angeles and Hong Kong, her practice explores how bodies form relationships with one another, with technological systems, and with the environments they inhabit. Through choreography, motion capture, XR, live media, avatars, and participatory structures, she creates performances and spatial experiences that examine presence, identity, care, memory, and the future of embodied interaction.

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Zelia’s practice examines how bodies, technologies, and environments shape one another. Her ongoing project REfract (2023-2026), commissioned by West Kowloon Cultural District, treats motion capture and virtual embodiment as choreographic tools for questioning presence and identity. This inquiry continued in Accelerating Dimension (2022), a participatory AR dance game presented at Phygital_D Festival, and in Living Landscape (2025), which reimagines mythology through care, vulnerability, and collective embodiment. Across performance, installation, and participatory formats, she creates encounters in which movement connects physical experience with emerging forms of storytelling.

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She is the co-founder of TechDanceLab, an artistic research and exchange platform connecting choreography with emerging technologies through workshops, artist laboratories, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Her current research extends toward ecological and more-than-human relationships, asking how choreography and interactive systems can cultivate attention toward plants, environments, and other forms of intelligence.

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From 2019 to 2023, Zelia was a professional dancer with City Contemporary Dance Company in Hong Kong. Her interdisciplinary collaborations have included projects with Gilles Jobin (Switzerland), T.H.E Dance Company / Kuik Swee Boon (Singapore), and artists and technologists across Asia, Europe, and North America. Her work has been presented through festivals, theatres, research platforms, and conferences including SIGGRAPH, the Game Developers Conference, and Gray Area.

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Zelia holds an MFA in Choreography and an MFA in Interactive Media for Performance from California Institute of the Arts, and a BFA (First Class Honours) in Contemporary Dance from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. She is an Asian Cultural Council Altius Fellow and a scholar recipient of the Hong Kong Jockey Club Music and Dance Fund. Alongside making performances, she writes, teaches, curates, and facilitates interdisciplinary exchanges around choreography, technology, and contemporary embodied practice.