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Chuyun Oh

Associate Professor, Dance


Chuyun Oh
Office: ENS 121
619-594-0911
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2015 Ph.D. Performance Studies (Portfolio in Gender Studies), The University of Texas at Austin, Austin TX
2008 M.A. Aesthetics, Ewha Woman’s University, Seoul, South Korea
2006 B.A. Dance & Philosophy, Ewha Woman’s University, Seoul, South Korea


Dr. Chuyun Oh (Ph.D. in Performance Studies at UT Austin) is an Associate Professor of Dance at San Diego State University. As a Fulbright scholar, she focuses on performance ethnography, activism, and racial and gender identities in transnational popular dance. Her work has appeared in Dance Research Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, Dance Chronicle, The Journal of Popular Culture, Communication, Culture & Critique, The International Journal of the History of Sport, The Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, and The Journal of Fandom Studies. She is a recipient of the Top Paper (2019) and Top Contributed Performance three times (2016- 2018) from the Performance Studies Division at National Communication Association. As a pioneer of K-pop dance research, she was the David Sanjek Keynote Speaker in Popular Music at the 64th Annual Conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2019. Her work has received positive media coverage in LA Times, Financial Times, Allure, SD Voyager Magazine, Voice of San Diego, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and more. She serves on the editorial boards of Text and Performance Quarterly and Review of Communication. She is a co-editor of Candlelight Movement, Democracy, and Communication in Korea (Routledge, 2021) and the author of K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media (Routledge, 2023).


She started her professional dance training at an early age at Little Angels Children’s Folk Ballet of Korea and then at the Kirov Academy of Ballet/Universal Ballet Academy, performing various roles in classical ballet repertoires. Early in her career as a modern dancer, she was trained in Horton and Graham techniques, received awards from international dance competitions such as Nakano International Dance Competition Japan and Seoul International Dance Competition judged by the Ailey School faculty, and toured across Germany, South Korea, Japan, Austria, and the U.S. Before coming to SDSU, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Guest Choreographer at Dance and Movement Studies at Hamilton College in New York.




Please visit the links for Dr. Oh’s work.



K-pop Dance book on Amazon
For Dr. Oh’s Research, visit: sdsu.academia.edu/ChuyunOh
For Performance work, visit: www.youtube.com/user/Chuyunoh