Sean Metzger

Sean Metzger is a scholar who works at the intersections of several fields: visual culture (art, digital media, fashion, film, theater) as well as Asian American, Caribbean, Chinese, cinema, performance, and sexuality studies. He has published approximately one hundred articles, interviews, and reviews as well as two books. Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (Indiana University Press, 2014) demonstrates how aesthetics, gender, politics, economics and race are interwoven through forms of dress from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries. The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2020) elaborates discourses of globalization through an examination of aesthetic objects and practices situated in cities from Shanghai to Cape Town. It received the John W. Frick Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society and the Humanities and Cultural Studies Book Award for Media, Performance, and Visual Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies.

Metzger has worked extensively to increase collaboration among thinkers and artists from different disciplines. In this vein, he has co-edited four books: Embodying Asian/American Sexualities with Gina Masequesmay (Lexington, 2009); Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures with Olivia Khoo (Intellect, 2009); Awkward Stages: Plays about Growing Up Gay with John Clum (Cambria, 2015); and The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre with Roberta Mock (Bloomsbury, 2024). As editor of the quarterly publication, Theatre Journal, he curated special issues entitled Minor Asias (2020), AI (2021), Installation (2022), Refugee Processing (2023), and the 75th Anniversary (with Laura Edmondson, 2023). For other journals, he co-edited four special issues: Cultural Dynamics (Race, Space, Place: The Making and Unmaking of Freedoms in the Atlantic World with Michaeline Crichlow, 2009 and Transient Performance with Kimberly Chantal Welch, 2021); Third Text (Islands, Images, Imaginaries with Francisco J. Hernández Adrián and Michaeline Crichlow, 2014); and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (Expressions of Asian Caribbeanness with Andil Gosine and Patricia Mohamed, 2019).

For his teaching and mentorship, Metzger won the 2025 Betty Jean Jones Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society. In 2022 he was part of the first cohort inducted into UCLA’s Faculty Mentoring Honor Society.

Metzger strives to create artistic and scholarly networks from the local to the global. He served on the Executive Board of Performance Studies international for six years, including as president from 2016-2020. In 2014, he taught for the UC Education Abroad Program at Fudan University (China). In 2025, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (England). At UCLA, he served as a Faculty in Residence for nine years, where he worked with students to engage Los Angeles as a global media capital. He also consults for major entertainment companies.

Before his arrival at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 2012, Metzger was an Assistant Professor at Duke University. He was also named the inaugural Fulbright Research Chair in North American Society and Culture at Concordia University (Canada) in 2008 and a Framing the Global Fellow with Indiana University and Indiana University Press from 2011-2018. At the beginning of his academic career, he served as adjunct faculty at Antioch University, Loyola Marymount University and the USC School of Dramatic Arts. In addition to his academic work, he spent three years in social services at the Los Angeles LGBT Center and as an independent consultant to school districts and other non-profit institutions.

Metzger holds a PhD in Theater, an MA in Comparative Literature, and a BA Summa Cum Laude in Humanities and Psychology.