Freyja Shengqi Zhang

Bio
Freyja Shengqi Zhang (張聖琪) is a writer and artist whose creative and research practice moves between theatre, performance, and moving image. Her work explores mourning, death, ritual, and memory, with a particular interest in how performances, images, and embodied practices carry and transform experiences of loss across time. Drawing on performance studies, visual culture, and historical inquiry, she considers how artistic and ritual practices engage with absence and create forms of remembrance for lives and experiences that have been overlooked or rendered invisible.

Her feature screenplay, centered on a historical Chinese opera troupe, has received a national award. Her theatre works include a solo performance exploring gendered experiences that premiered in Beijing, and a play on aging and intergenerational memory that received the top prize at Peking University’s Theatre Festival and was later presented at Tsinghua University’s Philosophy Theatre Festival. Her documentary and experimental films engage with trauma, memory, and oral histories of marginalized communities in China. Her films have been presented at festivals and academic institutions, including Visions du Réel, Tirana International Film Festival, Peking University, and Harvard University. Across these forms, her practice creates spaces for different voices, histories, and experiences to emerge.

Why Performance Studies?
I chose Performance Studies because it made me question whether performance exists only on stage—or whether it is at the core of how humans exist, relate, and make meaning.

Education
The Central Academy of Drama
BA, Drama Literature (Playwriting)
Beijing, China

Peking University
MFA, Film Studies
Beijing, China

Harvard University
Visiting Student Researcher, History of Art and Architecture 
Cambridge, Massachusetts