Mina Yang

Mina Yang is a researcher of Korean diasporic dance culture and a Korean traditional dancer whose work traces how dance moved across Eurasia in the bodies of the Koryo saram — the Koreans deported from the Russian Far East to Soviet Central Asia in 1937. Her work asks what survives displacement and the loss of language — and finds the answer in the body itself.

Yang is Research Professor at the Institute for Historical Studies, Chung-Ang University in Seoul. She holds an MA and a PhD from the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnic Studies at St. Petersburg State University, Russia, where she studied under the late Professor A. I. Kuropjatnik and specialized in the sociology of culture. Her graduate research examined how teaching and performing Korean traditional dance shaped identity and cultural adaptation among the Koryo saram in St. Petersburg, and how these community-level practices in turn contributed to broader cultural exchange between Russia and Korea. She also holds a BA in Sports Science with a major in Korean Traditional Dance from Seoul National University, where she graduated summa cum laude.

From 2006 to 2012 she served as artistic director of Soun, a Korean traditional dance company of Koryo saram members in St. Petersburg — years she describes as her true field site, out of which both her master’s and doctoral research grew. Her relationship with the company did not end when she returned to Korea: she has continued to visit and teach in person whenever possible, and during the pandemic she kept the collaboration alive over video calls, a partnership now approaching two decades.

Yang is currently principal investigator of a five-year National Research Foundation of Korea project (2025–2030), “Body and Memory of the Koryo Saram: Identity Expanded through Dance and Sport — Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Perspectives.”
Her scholarship draws on sources rarely brought together in one study: Sunbong, Lenin Kichi, and their successor newspapers — the Korean-language press published by Soviet Koreans across nearly a century, from the Russian Far East to Central Asia; archival research conducted in person in Vladivostok and St. Petersburg; and oral testimony gathered from the dwindling generation of artists who lived this history directly. Her attention to primary sources took shape at the Korea Dance Resource Center, where she worked as a researcher and later co-director. She has since served several times as a principal investigator for the ARKO Arts Archive’s national oral history program in the arts, recording the careers of dancers whose stories would otherwise go unwritten.

Yang’s research reveals a story more reciprocal than the standard account allows. Rather than treating Soviet Korean dance as a one-way inheritance from the Korean peninsula, her work documents a genuine cultural exchange: Korean choreographers built repertoire for Uzbek national companies even as Uzbek, Armenian, and Tatar artists incorporated Korean dance into their own. At the center of her current research is Hwang Jeong-wook, a choreographer trained in Pyongyang, Moscow, and Tashkent whose work moved fluidly between Korean collective farms and Uzbekistan’s national stage — a career Yang treats as a living argument that identity in diaspora is negotiated, layered, and made visible through the moving body rather than fixed by any single origin.

Her publications include studies in Pacific Focus and in Korean journals of Slavic, Central Asian, and dance studies. She has presented her research internationally, including at the Asia Pacific Dance Festival at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Sorbonne Nouvelle University, the University of Helsinki, and the University of Trier. In Korea she serves on the international committees of both the Society for Dance Documentation and History and the Korean Society of Dance Studies.

Yang works as both researcher and practitioner. She holds the Presidential Award in the master division of the Daegu National Gugak Competition, and in 2025 she designed and led Korean dance lecture-performances in Australia and the Philippines under the Touring K-Arts program, an experience that shapes the embodied, participatory approach she brings to this lecture. For her, the two halves of her work — the researcher who reconstructs a vanishing archive and the dancer who still carries its movement in her own body — are inseparable, and the Selma Jeanne Cohen Lecture is where they meet.