Aloha Kakou! Im Derek Soong, a student from Kaua'i, Hawai'i. I'm currently working as a tutor for the America Reads program as well as the Front Desk Receptionist for Performance Studies! Im a member of NYU's queer fraternity, Delta Lambda Phi, and I'm also the president of the Tisch Queer Artist Guild. I hope to work with my peers to create a safe space for queer artists within Tisch while also working to decolonize the archive of art that we consider to be canonical. I love language studies and am fluent in both English and the Hawaiian language. I'm currently working on my path to becoming trilingual as I'm taking up Cantonese while at NYU. I'm also obsessed with plants and flowers, especially the native Hawaiian flora of my home!

Why PS @ NYU?

Performance Studies allows us to better understand the way we interact through the world within our performances, whether it be on or off the stage. Once I began taking courses within this major I realized how much we live performance, and what I appreciate about this field of study is that PS allows us to expand on our understanding of performance through our own interests and passions.