I am a scholar of religion and performance focusing on the role of aesthetics in ritual efficacy. Beginning July 1, 2026, I will be a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Religion at Yale University in the Institute of Sacred Music. My first undergraduate seminar, “Liberation by Hearing: Sound and Listening to the Liminal,” is organized around the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo, or in-between space, and the Great Liberation by Hearing, also known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The course introduces students to sound and listening as media of religious experiences, with a focus on states of transition and intermediacy across Tibetan Buddhist and comparative frameworks. My second seminar, “The Wounds of Beauty: Aesthetics, the Sacred, and the Paradox of Intensity,” focuses more broadly on the role of aesthetic intensity in religious experience. You can read more about my teaching here.

I received my Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in 2026. My book project is based on my dissertation, “Dancing Tantra: Body, Text, and Performance in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism,” which explores Tibetan performance theories found in dance texts produced in Tibet from the 13th century to the present. By compiling and analyzing an archive of dance texts—alongside ethnographic fieldwork and learning from monastic dancers in India and the United States—my work combines historical analysis, textual interpretation, and performance-based methodology. This reveals how dance-writing became a discursive arena in which Tibetan Buddhist scholars theorized and re-theorized performance and ritual aesthetics across the longue durée of Tibetan Buddhist intellectual history.

Previously, I received an MA in East Asian Studies from Columbia University, an MA in Performance Studies, and a BFA in Drama and Dramatic Writing, both from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.