About
Jane Jian Su
Jane Jian Su is a theater designer-director and digital media artist. She works in the U.S. and internationally with her collective, in-version ensemble, developing hybrid performance works of theater, installation, and live media.
Jane has co-created Vanishing 1.0 (recipient of the Edinburgh Fringe Scotland Asian Arts Award), Vanishing 2.0, and Two for One (The Tank, NYC). The ensemble’s upcoming project, Chuan is a community ritual performance to be presented in July, 2026. Her work has been developed internationally, including a 2024 residency at Apartment Project Berlin. She is a two-time recipient of the Berkshires Art Association Fellowship.
Artistic Statement
Jane’s practice engages deeply with classical theatrical texts as living material. Rather than staging them verbatim, she collaborates with performers to “breathe with” the text: reimagining, reconstructing, discarding, recycling, and reassembling language through an embodied and iterative process. Words are treated as objects, broken and reactivated.
Her performance-making operates through what she calls a “theater of overload,” where excessive yet interconnected elements—visual, sonic, textual, and spatial—are woven into dense environments. Audiences are invited to navigate their own pathways, choosing how to attend, assemble meaning, and situate themselves. In this way, her work playfully destabilizes and reexamines the boundaries between the white cube and the black box.
Rooted in methodologies of live cinema and object play, Jane constructs performances that hold multiple realities at once—on stage, on screen, and in the imagination of the viewer. Everyday objects and keepsakes are activated as carriers of memory, intimacy, and latent narrative potential.
Jane embraces opacity as both an aesthetic and ethical position. If art resists total legibility, so too do we!