About

Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns is an Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA. Her writings include the book Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Global Empire, which received the Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies by the Asian American Studies Association, and she is a co-editor of the anthology California Dreaming: Place and Movement in Asian American Imaginary. Burns is working on a second monograph titled Asian American Elsewheres. As a dramaturg, she has collaborated with BIPOC inter/multidisciplinary theater- and dance-makers and is part of a research group studying the impact of COVID-19 closures on BIPOC theater artists and organizations. Her academic background includes a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a B.A. from California State University at Sonoma. Her scholarly work explores Asian American performance, feminist performance, and the cultural and political significance of embodied memory, traditional dances, and songs in shaping national identity and resistance, particularly within Filipino and Asian American contexts.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Law
• Pedagogy
• Library science
• Media studies
• History

Selected publications

• Introduction: Transnational Relations and Solidarities Against Martial Law Across Asia and the Americas

  American Quarterly · 2025-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Alongside and Behind the Community: TeAda’s Decolonial Ensemble Theater Practice

  Theatre Journal · 2023-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Alongside and Behind the Community: TeAda’s Decolonial Ensemble Theater Practice1 Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns (bio), Leilani Chan (bio), and Ova Saopeng (bio) This interview with TeAda Productions highlights the nearly three-decade-old inter/multidisciplinary theater organization’s commitment to community-based theater work dedicated to telling stories of immigrants and refugees. Founded by Leilani Chan in 1996, with Ova Saopeng now as the Co-Artistic Director, TeAda has pivoted away from the traditional “theater season” that includes presenting and producing works to focus on creating original ensemble work. In this interview, Chan and Saopeng discuss their works (Refugee Nation, with Laotian American communities; Global Taxi Drivers, with immigrant and refugee workers from Somali, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Russian, Thai, Ecuadorian, and Mexican refugees, and immigrant workers in the global taxi industry; and Masters of the Currents, inspired by the stories of Micronesians living in Hawai’i today), their methods of creation, and the relationships they have built and continue to maintain with those they have worked with. Centering community perspectives as their primary source, TeAda employs talk-stories, story-telling workshops, and individual interviews to construct the narrative of their theater pieces. [End Page E-55] TeAda identifies as a “nomadic theater,” inspired by the communities whose stories and experiences of itinerancy, displacement, migration, and diaspora TeAda foregrounds in their performance work.2 In their discussion of the relationships they create and maintain through their ensemble work both in and beyond Los Angeles, we recognize an articulation of Rossi Braidotti’s “politically invested cartography of the present condition of mobility in a globalized world…stressing the fundamental power differential among categories of humans and nonhuman travelers and movers.”3 Although TeAda’s reference to “nomadism and displacement” may sound similar to how postmodern theory uses these concepts to describe the contemporary human condition, Chan, Saopeng, and TeAda’s work emphasizes the importance of recognizing the power dynamics that contribute to the experience of displacement and nomadism. Their works portray these conditions as not simply consequences of modern society but are shaped by particular forms of inequality and marginalization. “Nomadic” also describes TeAda’s process of traveling to various communities outside Los Angeles to create their ensemble work and how their process has connected otherwise disparate communities. With their current work, Masters of the Currents, the presumed mobility of people from the Federated States of Micronesia [FSM], Guam, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands [RMI] exposes the continuing imperialist occupation by the United States. The US geopolitical investments in the Western Pacific create mobility pathways for those states’ citizens. Yet this mobility is encased in precarity and indeterminate relations with the US government and society that positions them as unequal and subordinate. For nearly three decades, I have had the honor and privilege of working with, witnessing, and learning from Leilani, Ova, and TeAda Productions’ work. I have benefitted from the space/home they have created for Asian American and the broader BIPOC, queer theater artists in Los Angeles and beyond. [End Page E-56] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Refugee Nation (2010), Pangea World Theater, Minneapolis. Left to right: Leilani Chan, Ova Saopeng. Photo by Sean Smuda. Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns (LMSPB): TeAda Productions’ mission foregrounds performances that express the experiences of communities that have been displaced, exploited, and overlooked—more explicitly, those of immigrants and refugees. How did you arrive at this commitment? Why are you centering the experiences of immigrants and refugees? Leilani Chan (LC): TeAda grew out of the multiculturalism movement of the time, committed to providing opportunities for people of color to develop their work. TeAda has been technically a nonprofit for over twenty years. I started producing solo and ensemble works in the mid to late nineties. We were tiny, and I was quite young, with all those lovely ideals. We attracted a lot of folks, especially women of color and multidisciplinary artists and dancers who also wanted to do theater. At that time, I was incorporating hula into storytelling. We were already doing ensemble practice and supporting many solo works. We were also producing TeAdaWorks Festival, primarily featuring solo performances, women of color, and queer solo...

  PublisherDOI

• Masagana 99: Beyond Seeds, Grains, and Stalks

  Alon Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies · 2021-11-18 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Alongside official policies and speeches declaring and steering official national identity, I turn to songs and dances as affective and performance archives that strategically rouse and structure our feelings of belonging to a cohesive and stable national culture. More broadly, I track the crafting of a Filipino/a national subject through state reliance on sedimented (and thus value-laden) forms such as ‘national traditions’ and ‘folk cultures’ to make possible the idea of a laboring and productive citizenry. I ask: How do traditional dances and songs sustain and indeed supplement the ambitions of government initiatives implemented during Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law, such as the rice production program Masagana 99? How do the timeless assemblages of performance shore up the edifice of an embattled and yet resilient nation-state? As we commemorate the afterlives of Martial Law, I return to such fragments of embodied memory with adjacent governmental policies of the time to underscore the complex scope and the scale of Marcos’s dictatorship, as well as relay these scenes as seeds of struggle, labor, and resistance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Notes

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Acknowledgments

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  I must begin by expressing my profound gratitude to the artists, cultural workers, performers, and many others who occupy the multiple stages of this book.Your labor has given me much to think about and engage with.I remain plagued by the limits of my own analysis but hopeful that what I begin here will be enough to generate further thoughts on, and surely much more complex readings of, Filipino/a performance.I thank Alleluia Panis, joel b tan, Christine Bacareza Balance, and Olivia Malabuyo for allowing me to run with puro arte.My interest in Filipino performance was first galvanized by the social protest theater of Sining Bayan.I thank Ermena Vinluan, Abe Toribio

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Frontmatter

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Bibliography

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Library science
  PublisherDOI

• About the Author

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “Creative Writing […] has a place in the curriculum”: Robert Wunsch at Black Mountain College, 1933-43

  2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Media studies
  Publisher

• 10. Cosmopolitanism

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rajini Srikanth

  3 shared

• Bridget Spicer

  2 shared

• Karen Larsen

  University of Wollongong

  2 shared

• Paul Flatau

  University of Western Australia

  2 shared

• Josephine Lee

  2 shared

• Kathryn Di Nicola

  2 shared

• Elizabeth Conroy

  Translational Research Institute

  2 shared

• S. J. Routh

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Woodrow Wilson/Andrew Mellon National Foundation Career Enha…
• The UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship (2003-2005)
• Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies by the Asian Amer…