A Bit About 程之柔(Chih-Jou Cheng)
"Living a life for service
Live by faith but not by sight
Lift each other up."
-- Alvin Ailey
Chih-Jou (之柔) is a Taiwanese physical theatre creator, movement artist, puppeteer, and co-artistic director of the Dawn Theatre Project, currently based in Chicago. She is dedicated to creating artworks that illuminate the challenges and joys of the human experience through collaborative physical theatre and puppetry. She approaches performance as a social practice—opening space for dialogue, challenging assumptions, evoking compassion, and bringing forward stories that are often left unspoken. Through embodied research and ensemble-based creation, she asks a recurring question: What does it mean to be human?
Her creative process is rooted in devised physical theatre, oral history, and collaborative research, often beginning with a social question and the community she hopes to serve. While primarily movement-based, she draws from puppetry, forum theatre, and participatory practices, allowing form to emerge in response to each inquiry. Her movement research explores how the body carries emotion, memory, and cultural inheritance. As an artist on the autism spectrum, Cheng is especially attuned to nuance in sound, rhythm, and physical presence, shaping holistic performance environments that invite shared, embodied experience.
As a performer, some of her performance credits include RHINOCEROS (by KT Shivak at Here Arts Center), The Dream King (Teatro Vista), The King and I (Drury Lane), and A Chorus Line as Connie (Metropolis), as well as work with Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Roughhouse Theatre, and Chicago Puppet Studio.
As a teacher and choreographer, she has choreographed Newsies for Music House and several other single pieces, including Devote, Relief, Endless Love, and Carry On. Additionally, one of her choreography pieces, Night Sky, for Bartelt Dancers youth company in Ohio, received two 1st places, Best Judge's choice of Choreography, and 5 other Awards in the 2018 competition season.
Her recent projects include “Above the Water”, “Unfinished Island Songs”, and “Arriving at Dawn”, exploring themes of migration, identity, and collective healing. Her work has been supported by the Ragdale Foundation, DCASE, and the Chicago Cultural Center Dance Studio Residency. She has been awarded the Chicago Arts & Health Pilot for Creative Workers, the 2024 Princess Grace Honoraria, the 2025 Princess Grace Fellow, and the 2025 3Arts Awards.