SanSan Kwan is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces (2013) and co-editor, with Kenneth Speirs, of Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects (2004). She remains active as a professional dancer and is currently performing with Lenora Lee Dance.

Winner, 2022 De La Torre Bueno Prize, Dance Studies Association

"highly original and compelling... a necessary text for practitioners looking to collaborate ethically across cultural, racial, social, and gendered spaces." -- grace shinhae jun, Journal of American Drama and Theatre

"Wrought from personal tragedy, SanSan Kwan's poignant Love Dances focuses on the ways intercultural duets model ethical modes for reaching across cultural, racial, national, gendered, and aesthetic divides to destabilize power dynamics between East and West, address trauma and loss, engender tolerance, and most radically, constitute embodied acts of love. Beautifully written, deftly theorized, and deeply moving." -- Rebecca Rossen, author of Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance

"Simultaneously heartfelt and critical, Love Dances provides a nuanced analysis of intercultural duets. Through vivid and compelling prose, Kwan mobilizes emotion as a means of rethinking collaboration across the divides of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, age, and ability. In the process, Kwan reframes not only the promises and pitfalls of intercultural collaboration but also the crises of our current economic and political moment." -- Janet O'Shea, author of Risk, Failure, Play: What Dance Reveals about Martial Arts Training