B.A. in Sociology, Harvard University; M.F.A. in Art, Carnegie Mellon University
Lena Chen is an artist and Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her research examines the performance practices of Asian American/diasporic artists, sex workers, and community organizers in Los Angeles and New York City. An internationally exhibiting artist, she has been awarded grants from Mozilla Foundation, Sundance Institute, and the Center for Cultural Power.
She has been published in Amerasia Journal, PUBLIC, Performance Research, and in the edited volumes Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2022), Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the Twenty-First Century (NYU Press, 2024), and To Be Named: The Cultural Politics of Naming. (Routledge, forthcoming). She has taught classes on feminist theory, Asian American performance art, and socially engaged art.
She is the recipient of the Thomas Marshall Graduate Student Award from American Society for Theatre Research, Emerging Scholars Award from American Theatre & Drama Society, and Dunbar Ogden Essay Prize in Theater History from UC Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. She is the co-coordinator of the Performing Asian American & Diasporic Sexualities Working Group at UC Berkeley's Center for Race & Gender.