ABOUT
Originally trained in dance and theatre design, over 25 years Justine Shih Pearson has developed an interdisciplinary practice as a creative producer, facilitator, artist, writer, arts researcher and advocate.
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Based in Sydney since 2007, Justine operates between creative and cultural leadership roles in the performing arts, collaborating on projects for live performance, digital media, film/tv, publishing, public spaces, hospitals, and museums in Australia, Europe, the UK, North America, and SE Asia. With a reputation for championing the work of artists and dedication to art form development, she has been Executive Director/CEO of PACT Centre for Emerging Artists since 2021.
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[100-word bio, updated 6 Oct 2025]
She is also on the board of artist-run space ReadyMade Works, which she chaired from 2017-2022; and was previously director of choreographic research centre Critical Path, producer of screendance festival ReelDance, and a programming fellow with Dance Theater Workshop/NY Live Arts. Justine holds a PhD (USyd) and MA (NYU) in performance studies, and lectures, writes and consults on intercultural/interdisciplinary creative practices and placemaking. Mixed-race and multinational, growing up between the unceded lands of the Ohlone, Lenape, Kaurna, and Gadigal as part of the Chinese diaspora, Justine is a child of the Asia Pacific and this geo-cultural context pervades her approach.
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[200-word bio, updated 6 Oct 2025]
THE LONGER STORY
I can't escape that I am a child of 1980s Silicon Valley – that social and technological context have defined my life and work, just as my geo-cultural position as a mixed-race kid with two passports and a large extended multinational Chinese family plays a huge role in forming my worldview.
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Despite this, I grew up very much an artist, drawing in the corner when I wasn't at dance school. I loved the backstage spaces of the wings, long days in rehearsal, and went on to train in theatre design at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
From early days hoofing it around NYC working on everything from big-budget musical theatre, to off-off Broadway, small-budget independent film, commercial tv, puppetry and object performance, I developed a real value for craft and interest in experimental research-driven practice.
It is the​ wide exposure to art form and ideas that I draw on still to sharpen my dramaturgical insight, underpin my production and producing know-how, and inform my deep love of collaboration. I am still a designer to the core but in a more expanded interdisciplinary sense.
Design is fundamentally about problem-solving, studying what an object or system needs to do and figuring out through innovation and exploration how to make it function better. It is also humanist—it has to work in relation to our experience on individual, social and cultural levels by finding a language to speak to our senses and values through material form. Designing is the skill to combine the crafting of fine detail with macro-analysis and an eye always attuned to the big picture.
Moving between the US and Australia in the 2000s, I collaborated with a range of artists working with interdisciplinary and devised contemporary performance and dance practices, such as Jo Dudley, Ingrid Voorendt, Zoë Barry, Martin del Amo, Julie-Anne Long, Linda Luke, Narelle Benjamin, and others.
Undertaking research in performance studies at NYU in the mid-2000s was a turning point for me. I began making site-based audiowalks as a way to expand the sensory and somatic strategies of dance towards explorations of place and the everyday movements of the streets.
Based in Sydney since 2007, I went on to doctoral research in the area of intercultural practice. Meanwhile, my creative practice focussed increasingly on collaborations with artists working between traditional and contemporary practices, including Raghav Handa and Maharshi Raval, Ade Suharto and Peni Candra Rini, Jade Dewi Tyas Tungal and Ria Soemardjo, and Victoria Hunt (with whom she won a 2018 Green Room Award for Best Visual Design).
In all my work I seek to centre the complexities of diasporic, postcolonial, indigenous and migrant experience.
The key elements of my practice are space and movement. my methods utilise knowledges from dance and performance but turn them to engaging with social life more broadly, be it how fabric interfaces with a contemporary dancer or how a city organises its people. And I often work closely with contemporary artists innovating traditional cultural practices, because underpinning all my work is a drive to capture today’s persistent tension between globalising forces and attachments to local practice/place.
My writing encompasses performance in everyday life, the embodiment of national and cultural belonging, intercultural dramaturgies and creative practice, spatial practices and urbanism, public space and social reliance.
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My monograph Choreographing the Airport: Field Notes From the Transit Spaces of Global Mobility (Palgrave 2018), charts how choreographic thinking can be used to study transnational systems of mobility like the airport.
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I am invited to speak regularly on cultural practice and the arts, performing arts in the Asia Pacific region, creative access
and disability arts, and interdisciplinary performance.​
As an editor, I've worked with more than 50 writers on subjects as diverse as living with crocodiles, disability as spectacle at the Paralympics, odissi connections to architecture, Holocaust memorialisation and placemaking in Vienna, mana wahine in Disney’s Moana, and the creative potential of migratory shorebirds.​
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I have taught at the University of Sydney, UNSW, Macquarie University, and the National Institute of Dramatic Art in performance studies, art and design.