Dr. Evelyn Wan is Assistant Professor in Media, Arts, and Society at the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She is the Programme Coordinator for MA Arts and Society, and works on interdisciplinary curriculum innovation in the domain of Humane AI. She is an awardee of the KNAW Early Career Partnership in 2026, which recognises her interdisciplinary approach to AI research. She is the initiator and co-convenor of the inter-Asia Performance Studies working group (2026-2029) at Performance Studies international (PSi).

Dr Wan’s broad research interests are largely organised under the twin concepts of ‘technology’ and ‘decolonality’, grounded in decolonial media studies and performance studies. Her first research trajectory focuses on decolonial computation, and alternative histories of technologies via women, people of colour, and indigenous cultures. Her second trajectory focuses on dance (as a technology of transmission) and performance studies in the inter-Asian context. Both trajectories aim at decentring Western and Eurocentric epistemologies, and at broadening knowledge production from pluriversal perspectives.

Wan graduated cum laude from her PhD programme at Utrecht University and was awarded a prestigious national dissertation prize by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation in the Netherlands in 2019. Her writings have appeared in International Journal of Communication, GPS: Global Performance Studies, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, and Theatre Journal, amongst others.

In the last 20 years, Wan has collaborated with various international artists in staging contemporary dance, physical theatre, and site-specific performances as both performer and dramaturg, and has volunteered for theatre projects with asylum seeker youths. Her current performance practice, Archaeologies of AI and Beyond the Shore, uses a range of critical and creative methods, including research creation, media archaeology, mythwork, critical fabulation, and archipelagic method.

In Hong Kong, Wan is a founding member of the artist collective If Time’s Limited, with funding support from Hong Kong Arts Development Council for various performing arts projects. The intergenerational community arts project Ivy Says (2025), where she was dramaturg, was awarded The Hong Kong Dance Award for Outstanding Non-Conventional Space Production in 2026. She has collaborated with institutions such as Hong Kong Arts Centre and Tai Kwun.

In the Netherlands, she is part of the Holistic Technology Salon, a network of artists, curators, and researchers at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam). She also is a regular speaker and moderator at cultural institutions such as IMPAKT, SPRING, and Framer Framed.

Wan currently serves on the Executive Board of Performance Studies international (PSi). She founded and led the Future Advisory Board, an emerging scholar and diversity initiative in the organisation, between 2014-2019. She also serves on the Supervisory Board of TETEM, a maker lab and exhibition space for art, technology, and society in Enschede, the Netherlands.

Employment:

  • Assistant Professor in Media, Arts, and Society at Utrecht University (2021-present); Programme Coordinator of MA Arts & Society (2022-present)
  • Lecturer at Utrecht University (2020-2021)
  • Postdoctoral researcher at TILT (Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society) on an ERC-funded project on data protection and information-induced harms (2018-2020)

Education:

  • PhD, cum laude (Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands) (2018)
  • Research MA in Media and Performance Studies, cum laude (Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands), with Contemporary Performance Practice (Erasmus exchange at University of Kent, Canterbury) (2014)
  • MA in Gender Studies, cum laude (Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands) (2011)
  • BSocSci in Government and Laws, First Class Honours (The University of Hong Kong) (2010)

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