Liyan Zhao
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I'm a visual storyteller working primarily in moving image, with experience in ux and print design.
The heart of my work lies in the belief that living in the world is inherently relational. My practice inside this expanded ecological frame strives to untangle existential experiences that confound and overwhelm—social, environmental and intimate experiences of joy, pain, amazement, and longing. My personal position serves as a starting point, a constellationary node in search of junctions to follow. While my voice sets up certain formal frames, the goal is plasticity—assemblages that welcome interjections and openings. The answer is a question. The response is “yes and...”
I hold an MFA in cinematic arts from University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, an MFA in graphic design from Yale School of Art and a BA in architecture from Princeton University.
WORK
SAMPLE
Film Work Samples2019—2025
A mix of exhibited works and works in progress, this compilation showcases my camera, sound, and editing sensibilities. In my film work, I approach each project with a spirit of experimentation, seeking out new forms and structures that booster each story.
ROSIE'S
SONG
Rosie's Song2025, video
A robin, a blind dog, a woman, her two grandchildren, guinea pigs, and doves share a home in the country. Following perspectival threads that weave in and out of each other, a cacophonous portrait of life together emerges.
THE QUESTION
OF GRIEF
The Question of Grief2024, video performance
Can grief be generous? Is it inherently self-pitying? Can it strike you down? Can it treat you well? Is it possible to change the past? Do you get a choice? Can you mourn an ineffable loss? Can you anticipate a place that can’t be known until you reach it? Who is changed and who is dead?
This performance begins as a desktop lecture exploring different facets of grief before exploding out into a light-sound-olfactory ritual space that asks us to sit together with loss in an embodied way. An assemblage of found and original image and audio blends references from history, science, folk traditions, and mythology along with diaristic accounts of my own encounters with grief.
Exhibited at the 602 Club, Underscore Gallery, HF Johnson Gallery, and Onion City Experimental Film Festival.
A FEW ATTEMPTS
TO UNDERSTAND
THE SKY
A Few Attempts to Understand the Sky2023, video
The film weaves together a history of sky auguries, meteorological forecasting technologies, extreme weather events, ghosts of extinction, and signs of speciary adaptation. These stories are interspersed with participatory interludes in a constellation united by two overarching concerns: the problem of representation when it comes to climate change—how can we understand and feel climate change in a sustained and embodied way?—and questions around how we can best live together with other species under ecological precarity. The interludes include both filmed and live exercises that engage the audience's voices and body movements in attempts to become bird and sense weather phenomena in our own bodies. The film is a collaborative, pedagogical experiment in attention and collectivity, asking us to acknowledge our shared implication in a climate reality filled with both grief and wonder, and, together, to imagine richer futures for our world.
Screened at Film Diary NYC and Winnipeg Underground Film Festival
WEATHER
DIARY
2023, web
I spent two years collecting weather observations—daily polaroids of the sky, personal notes, extreme weather news alerts, local birding listserv updates, photos and videos sent by friends. To help archive and organize this growing collection, I built a website that allowed the media to be accessed and configured in relation to one another, fostering moments of formal and conceptual serendipity. These materials would later become the building blocks for my short film "A Few Attempts to Understand the Sky."
VERIZON
DEVICE
SHOWCASE
Verizon Retail Device Showcase Design2020—2022, digital
As a designer on Verizon's Creative Marketing Group retail design team, I worked on short videos, UX interfaces, and typographic animations that lived on devices in stores across the nation.
THE
VISITORS
The Visitors2021, video
A close mapping of beings sharing the same small Brooklyn apartment during the pandemic. Sound waves and small creatures emerge in turn, assembling a portrait of shared life under precarity.
Screened at Onion City Experimental Film Festival, CROSSROADS, and One Room Gallery.
DISABILITY
X
MATERNITY
Disability x Maternity: A Household User's Manual for Young Mothers with Disability2020, video, 3:32
What would it be like to design for help—not with a medical model but a social one? And how can design help caregivers in need of care themselves? A recently developed manual for young mothers with acquired disabilities, Disability x Maternity considers these questions offering guidelines for using space.
I produced a video accompaniment to Frani O'Toole's printed guide using overlayed home videos, photos, illustrations, and text to demonstrate home-based design and accessibility strategies.
Exhibited at Center of Architecture, Gates Foundation Discovery Center, and Kosovo Architecture Festival.
A HOUSE OF
ONE'S OWN
A House of One's Own2019, video
This experimental documentary tells the story of my parents' move to America, and how their dreams and aspirations have been channeled through the space of their suburban house. The film explores rituals of assimilation and alienation and the lines between real and imagined.
Screened at New Haven International Film Festival and New Haven Documentary Film Festival.
YALE EVENT
POSTERS
Yale Event Poster Designs2016—2019, digital & print
Posters designed for Yale School of Art and Yale University Art Gallery events.
JOHN
ASHBERY'S
NEST
John Ashbery's Nest2018, web
Online archive of poet John Ashbery's home I worked on as a UX design fellow at the Yale Digital Humanities Lab. The site utilizes architectural virtual tour technology in its navegation. Objects around the home can be clicked to reveal additional information and narration.
MY NAME
IS JUAN
My Name is Juan2018, print
This book documents the story of an undocumented teen named Juan living next to the US-Mexican border, told in his own words. The transcript from Juan's audio diary runs alongside satellite images of the Rio Grande River. As Juan's story unfolds, the river slowly winds from El Paso until it finally reaches the Gulf of Mexico. As an object, the book's large size is meant to serve as a kind of physical anchor as Juan goes through a period of extreme instability.
YOU'VE
ARRIVED
You've Arrived2018, print
This book documents a visit to Holy Land USA, an abandoned religious theme park in Waterbury, CT. The book presents a sequence of video stills taken on location. The filtered images, paired with a piece of stream-of-conscious writing about memory tucked into the insides of the french folds, capture a dream-like journey through an eerie liminal space that crosses time and geography.
THE RADICAL
OTHER
the radical Other2018, print
After writing a speculative text about the subversive power of otherness inspired both by personal experience and the critical essays I was reading at the time, I set the excerpts taken from my readings into my writing in order to create a polyvocal reading experience.
SHADOW
PUPPET
ARCHIVE
Peabody Museum Shadow Puppet Archive2018, web
This site is a digital archive of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History's collection of Chinese shadow puppets. Users can browse through detailed views of the puppets or go into play mode where they can animate their own shadow puppet show.
In digitizing the shadow puppets, I considered strategies towards creating a living archive, one that allows users to interact with the puppets in dynamic ways despite their relative inaccess to the actual physical objects.
UNREADING
TEXT
Unreading Text2017, web
This site transforms text from legible information to ornamental pattern. Users input their custom text, which is then converted into an ornamental typeface. Users can change the colors of the type and the background and toggle between two modes of readability.
This project was conceptualized as a tactic to deal with the deluge of digital information I was bombarded with on a daily basis. In thinking about how to lessen the anxiety of living in today's mediascape, I sought comfort in disruption and illegibility.
CIVIL
DISOBEDIENCE
GUIDES
ACT UP Civil Disobedience Guides2017, print
These participatory booklets are a redesign of ACT UP's Civil Disobedience Training Guide. The original 55-page text document is reformatted and reprinted as pocket-sized guides, easy to carry and conceal. The original document credits sections to The War Resister's League's Handbook for Nonviolent Action, and these booklets continue the tradition of disseminating open-sourced knowledge to the public
O-14
MONOGRAPH
O-14: Projection and Reception2016, print
This book is a monograph of RUR Architecture's O-14 building in Dubai. Meant to serve as tool for architecture students, the book contains diagrams and writings illuminating O-14's unique design principles. As the designer, I worked on page layouts as well as illustrating diagrams that explain the design of the building.
