Mel Wong
Dance Foundation

Mel Wong was a fourth-generation Chinese American born in 1938 in Oakland, California. He found dance through high-school gymnastics — adding steps to his floor exercises — and went on to train at Anna Halprin's San Francisco studios and as a Ford Foundation scholarship student at George Balanchine's School of American Ballet.

He performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1968 to 1972, appearing in original casts of Canfield and Second Hand, and choreographed across his career — more than 180 works moving between rigorous postmodern abstraction and stories of cultural identity. His 1989 solo Childhood Secrets and the touring Growing Up Asian American in the 50s — danced, spoken, and laced with yo-yo tricks — pioneered what would later be called dances of cultural identity.

In 1983 he became the first Chinese American to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography. Six National Endowment for the Arts grants and commissions from Hong Kong, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands followed. From 1989 until his death in 2003, he was a tenured professor of dance in the Department of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught his own modern technique — "The Wong Way" — to generations of dancers.

He died on July 17, 2003, of an apparent heart attack at the age of 64. He is survived by his wife of twenty years, the dancer and writer Connie Kreemer, and their three daughters.

Mel Wong was also a working visual artist. His paintings, drawings, lithographs, sculpture, and pottery were exhibited in galleries across the United States. The retrospective other Realm was mounted at UC Santa Cruz in October 2003 — a few months after his death.