Kayva Yang

Kayva Yang is driven by the desire for a just world –in our lifetime. As a kid, she made things: plays, poems, paintings, and forts. She also felt injustices: police brutality against Rodney King in Los Angeles and anti-immigrant slurs in school. These early moments fed her creative fervor and a commitment to social change. 

Kayva has worked with national and regional organizations that provide vital resources for individuals and organizations including artists at the forefront of justice movements. Before studying at NYU, she facilitated the design process, funding and community engagement efforts of foundations working toward racial and health equity. Prior to this, she was director of programs at PFund Foundation where she worked to support and connect queer leaders combating hate and responding to community wide priorities.

In addition to her field work, Kayva is an artist. Having been a founding member of and dancer with Ananya Dance Theatre and Aniccha Arts, she continues to perform in collaborative and experimental spaces. Her work explores the politics of displacement, interconnection, regeneration, decay, gesture and silence where photography intersects performance. She is evolving her own practice from a feminist, queer, of color aesthetic. She is a 2016 selected artist in Queertopia at Intermedia Arts and i don't normally do this at the Southern Theater.

Kayva is based in New York City and Minneapolis.

What drew you to the MA Arts Politics program?

The time is ripe for me to step back, take a breath and expand my ideas and practices in arts politics. I have gained a tremendous breadth and depth of knowledge and experience in arts and advocacy for social change through the people and organizations that I have worked with over the past several years. I felt it was time to expand my thinking, researching, writing, and making. To do this at the Tisch School of the Arts, in the arts politics program, with a faculty who is a tremendous resource as artists, educators, scholars and cultural workers and all in a city filled with multifaceted creatives - is an extraordinary opportunity. I look forward to being immersed, surprised and challenged while studying at NYU and living in the city.