Lena Chen is an artist and Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her research examines the performance practices of Asian American/diasporic artists, sex workers, and community organizers in Los Angeles and New York City. A recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, she holds a B.A. in Sociology from Harvard University and a M.F.A. in Fine Art from Carnegie Mellon University.
Her work has appeared in Amerasia Journal, PUBLIC, Performance Research, and in the edited volumes Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2022), Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the Twenty-First Century (NYU Press, 2024), and To Be Named: The Cultural Politics of Naming. (Routledge, forthcoming). An internationally exhibiting artist, she has been awarded grants from Mozilla Foundation, Sundance Institute, and the Center for Cultural Power.
