Yin Mei was born in China and started her professional career in traditional Chinese dance during the Cultural Revolution. Joining a leading state dance company at the age of fourteen, she was trained in Chinese traditional dance and Peking opera dance. Before coming to the United States to study modern dance on a grant from the Asian Cultural Council, she was a professional dancer with the Henan Song and Dance Troupe and later a principal dancer with the Hong Kong Dance Company, where she danced leading roles in the traditional Chinese dance repertoire. She is now a professor and the Director of dance at Queens College, City University of New York. Her choreography has been hailed by critics as “theatrical magic” (New York Times) and as inhabiting “the tremulous space where dreams and memory reside” (Village Voice). Yin Mei herself is described as a “dancer of exquisite lyricism and delicacy” (New York Times) and “a stunning presence, bringing her classical Chinese training and aesthetic into a blend with her adopted Downtown sensibilities with refined grace” (Dance Insider).