G Yi

Rev. g (they/he) is a crip queerean transdisciplinary artist-activist, ordained healer-abolitionist, and third-year PhD student in Performance Studies. Pre-UCSD, they spent 6+ years on Muwekma-Ohlone land (at Stanford University)--where they earned their BAH in Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity and MA in Communication/Media Studies; co-instructed experiential seminars on trauma-informed holistic healing and “Transforming Self and Systems”; and co-founded the Mental Health & Wellness Coalition during their tenure as Director of Mental Health & Wellness. Prior to pursuing the art praxis of academic writing, they dabbled in filmmaking and drag/performance art, installed public art interventions, and served as a Fellow at the Center for Asian American Media and as a Mentor-Artist for SJSU’s Queer & Asian Artist Residency. His drag persona’s directorial debut, Sir Valence Presents: Watching U, is currently screening at the SF Transgender Film Festival and Seattle Queer Film Festival.

g’s doctoral research explores the potentiality of contemporary trans/gendered performance (i.e. drag artistry, BDSM roleplay, trans avatars in immersive virtual environments, etc.) as a decolonial praxis of somatic and psychospiritual healing--in conversation with the histories, aesthetics, semiotics, and embodiments of Indigenous Corean proto-transgenderal shamans and their gender-bending psychodramatic initiation rituals. Excited to continue riding on the trains of thought set in motion by their honors thesis on Korean Comfort Women and modern-day Asian sex workers, g is also interested in more deeply studying: Disability Justice and its overlaps with sex work communities and entheogenic/psychedelic healing, nonlinear temporalities and post-survivorship futurities/intimacies/worldmaking, and the intergenerational gifts that accompany intergenerational traumas--as well as ‘authenticity’ under the Panopticon and magical realist renderings of neurodiversity. Furthermore, as g continues his formal mugyo training under 무궁화 Mudang, he remains curious about integrating conceptualizations of the Divine, interlives/liminality, multiplicity, and Ancestral dreamwork into their research from a performance studies approach.

Research 

The intersections of Performance Studies/Practice as Research, Trans/Gender/Queer Studies, Disability [Justice] Studies, Indigenous+diasporic Corean cultures and traditions, sex work studies, critical theory & decolonial thought, theory in the flesh & countercultural survivorship strategies, community-centered arts for trauma-informed embodied/collective healing & Transformative Justice, spiritual performance and transformation, [immersive] media psychology & mystical/psychedelic/altered states of consciousness.

Education  

BAH in Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity (specialization: Racial Representation in Media) 

MA in Communication (specialization: Media Studies) from Stanford University

Interfaith Chaplain/Spiritual Mental Health Counseling Certification & Ordination, The Chaplaincy Institute

Somatic Attachment Therapy Certification, The Embody Lab

Embodied Social Justice Certification, Transformative Change