Professional dancers, advocates, educators, and co-founders of Final Bow for Yellowface Phil Chan and Georgina Pazcoguin share their personal lives, careers, and transitions as Asian-American dance-artists. They will be joined by Dr. Brynn Shiovitz and Dr. Stephanie Takaragawa to discuss Asian representation, yellow face in dance, and the state of the movement arts as insiders informed by their extensive performance careers and creative pursuits.

Phil Chan is a co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, and most recently served as the Director of Programming for IVY, connecting young professionals with leading American museums and performing arts institutions. He is a graduate of Carleton College and an alumnus of the Ailey School. As a writer, he served as the Executive Editor for FLATT Magazine and contributed to Dance Europe Magazine, Dance Magazine, Dance Business Weekly, and the Huffington Post. He was the founding General Manager of the Buck Hill Skytop Music Festival, and was the General Manager for Armitage Gone! Dance and Youth America Grand Prix. He served multiple years on the National Endowment for the Arts dance panel and the Jadin Wong Award panel presented by the Asian American Arts Alliance. He serves on the Leaders of Color steering committee at Americans for the Arts, the International Council for the Parsons Dance Company, and the Advisory Board of Dance Magazine. He is the author of Final Bow for Yellowface: Dancing between Intention and Impact, and a 2020 New York Public Library Dance Research Fellow.

Georgina Pazcoguin (“The Rogue Ballerina”) is a co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, and is a soloist with New York City Ballet. She is most recently featured on the hit show Fosse/Verdon 2019. She is also featured in the film NY EXPORT: OPUS JAZZ, which won the Audience Award at the 2010 SXSW Film Festival. Pazcoguin’s many NYCB credits include Anita in West Side Story. Her extensive repertory of George Balanchine works include lead roles in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3. Her American Dance Machine for the 21st Century credits: Cassie in A Chorus Line, Jerome Robbin's Mr. Monotony, Margo Sappington's Oh! Calcutta! Pas de Duex. Broadway Credits: “Ivy” in 2014 Revival of On The Town. Georgina originated the role of “Victoria” the White Cat in the first revival of Cats on Broadway choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler in 2016. Ms. Pazcoguin was a recipient of the Mae L. Wien Award for Outstanding Promise in 2002. She is a two-time Chita Rivera Award nominee for outstanding dancer. She is the recipient of The 2019 Outstanding Filipinos in America Courage of Conviction Award. More info: GeorginaPazcoguin.com | Instagram: @Georgina_Pazcoguin

Brynn Shiovitz received her PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA and her MA in Performance Studies from NYU.  In addition to lecturing at Chapman she is currently the Scholar in Residence for the San Francisco Ballet. She is the editor of The Body, the Dance, and the Text: Essays on Performance and the Margins of History (McFarland, 2019). Additionally, her writing on dance can be seen in Dance Chronicle, Theatre Survey, Women and Performance, Jazz Perspectives, and Dance Research Journals, Dance, Dance Spirit, and Dance Teacher Magazines, and soon an anthology on African Diaspora Dance edited by Thomas DeFrantz. Her forthcoming monograph, Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood’s Golden Age (Oxford, 2021) considers invisible acts of blacking up in screened and animated tap dance performances despite rigid censorship laws.  

Stephanie Takaragawa is an Associate Professor of Sociology. Her research interests focus on issues of representation in film, mass media, art, performance, and cultural display. She is a founding member of the curatorial collective Ethnographic Terminalia (http://ethnographicterminalia.org/). Her dissertation Visualizing Japanese-America: the Japanese American National Museum and the Construction of Identity examined the role of the Japanese American National Museum in the construction and dissemination of a Japanese-American identity. She was the president of the Society for Visual Anthropology (2015-2017)(http://societyforvisualanthropology.org/) a subsection of the American Anthropological Association.

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