Yin Mei Cursive: I Dance To Keep Things Whole – Biographies

Yin Mei (Artistic Director, Choreographer, Performer) With the success of her three most recent evening-length dance theater works – Empty Tradition/City of Peonies, /Asunder and Nomad: The River – Yin Mei has established herself as a choreographer uniquely positioned to explore themes of artistic and spiritual significance arising at the intersection between Asian traditional performance and Western contemporary dance.  Yin Mei began her career as a member of a leading traditional Chinese dance company.  She formed her contemporary company, Yin Mei Dance, in 1995, having forged a choreographic style employing Chinese energy direction and spatial principles as a means of creating dance within the rubric of experimental modern dance.  Typically collaborating across cultural and artistic boundaries, Yin Mei has worked with such well-known visual artists as MacArthur award winner Xu Bing and Cai Guo Giang (China), composers Robert Een (U.S.) and Tony Prabowo (Indonesia), and performers as varied as Tibetan modern dancer Sang Jijia, traditional Balinese masked dancer I Nyoman Catra and downtown dance luminary Jeanine Durning.

Yin Mei received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 and a Choreography Award from New York Foundation for the Arts in 2002. Yin Mei’s work has been supported by the NEA, NEFA/National Dance Project, the Jerome Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation and the Presidential Research Award from Queens College. She received her BA and MFA from New York University.  She has been a Professor of Dance at Queens College since 1992.

Wei Ligang (Calligrapher, Painter) is one of China’s most distinguished young artists of contemporary calligraphy. His work was shown in the internationally- acclaimed exhibition, The Art of Modern Calligraphy in China, that was held at the British Museum in 2002 and he has taken part in many exhibitions in China, including a solo exhibition held at the He Xiangning Museum in Shenzhen in 2004.  He is currently Vice Chairman of the China Society of Modern Calligraphers and a professor of the Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai Campus.

Wei Ligang was born in 1964 in Datong, Shanxi, into a family of professionals in the traditional performing arts and as a child learned to perform local opera, magic tricks and cross-talk comedy routines.  At the age of nine he began to study calligraphy and quickly emerged as a brilliant prodigy whose work was shown publicly.  In 1981 he entered the prestigious Nankai University in Tianjin where he majored in mathematics. Following his graduation in 1985, he taught mathematics in a teacher’s college in Datong for ten years before returning in Beijing to join the bohemian artist’s colony Yuan Ming Yuan.  During that time he helped to establish Beijing’s first gallery specializing in modern calligraphy, Song Feng Yuan.

In 1999 Wei Ligang was one of the organizers of the notorious Bashu Parade, the first exhibition of modern calligraphy held in Chengdu, which resulted in a storm of criticism from traditional circles and launched a major intellectual controversy about Chinese calligraphy, which continues today.  In 2005, the Asian Cultural Council awarded Wei Ligang the Dr. Joseph K. W. Li Arts Fellowship, which supported several months of research in the United States on recent developments in contemporary art.

James L. Muyskens became the ninth president of Queens College on July 29, 2002 after having served as CEO and Dean of the Faculty for the Gwinnett University Center/University System of Georgia.

Dr. Muyskens’ senior-level and extensive administrative experience includes serving as Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs for the University System of Georgia which includes 205,000 students and 80,000 faculty members on 34 campuses. As part of the university system management team from 1995 to 1999, he implemented a new system-wide undergraduate core curriculum, higher admissions and academic standards, and enhanced faculty and staff development opportunities.

Having directed the University’s extensive investigation into instructional technology and distance learning and developed a technology plan for higher education in Georgia, Dr. Muyskens was given the opportunity in 1999 to put the plan into practice – to create a new campus, the Gwinnett University Center, sometimes referred to as the “bricks and clicks” campus.

The appointment to Queens College marks Dr. Muyskens’ return to the City University of New York. From 1984 to 1987 he served as Associate Provost and Acting Provost at Hunter College and spearheaded a revision of the undergraduate curriculum, among other efforts. Dr. Muyskens also served as chairman of Hunter College’s Department of Philosophy and Director of the Religion Program.

Before joining the University System of Georgia, Dr. Muyskens held the position of Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas from 1988 to 1995.

A graduate of Central College in Iowa, he also earned a Master’s of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. His publications include many on ethics, especially for health care providers, including Moral Problems in Nursing: A Philosophical Investigation published in 1982. Two chapters were reprinted in 1990 in Ethics in Nursing: An Anthology.

He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching and is a frequent speaker at national education conferences.