BIO

Celestine Tai Tai is a performance artist based in Chicago, with roots in New York and California. Identity, fragility, and resilience are key themes in her work, which draws on her experience as a Taiwanese citizen raised in Latin America. By immersing the body around the objects of menial labor, she challenges assumptions about where these objects belong, who belongs with them, and their relationship to living bodies. Her performances create playful and dramatic relationships between human body parts and inanimate objects. She invites audiences to take a fresh look at differences between motion and stillness, animate and inanimate, human and non-human. She is in the 2023 MFA in Visual Arts class at the University of Chicago. Prior to that, she obtained her BA in dance and psychology at Washington University, and Certificate in contemporary dance performance at the Peridance Capezio Center. Her work has been shown at Judson Church, New York Live Arts, Governor's Island, The Exponential Festival, Breaking Ground Festival (AZ), Chashasma (UES), Dixon Place, the Immigrant Artist Biennial fundraiser, Nimbus Dance, MAIDEN-LA, and Supercollider Arts to name a few. She has received grants from Dance/NYC, California Arts Council, and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts to support her art work.