After training as a studio artist, Moy went on to graduate study at Cal Arts where he became interested in happenings and performance art. This led him to complete advanced studies in stage direction and eventually a third degree with a dual focus on playwriting and performance history with Professor Barnard Hewitt. For his third degree, Moy trained as a specialist in pre-twentieth century popular culture, and eventually wrote a dissertation on the late eighteenth century American circus. Possessing a voracious curiosity about all things visual, Moy is attracted to interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and experimental modes of inquiry. Beyond Moy's training as a studio painter, his engagement with the visual arts has included work as a photographic technician in a transmission electron microscopy laboratory, writer for industrial films and trade shows, photographer in a creative agency, and involvement in technology transfers of scientific visualization techniques (RAVE) for use in art environments.
Moy's interdisciplinary research focus eventually led to interrogations of the practice of racial representation in America. Accordingly, his book Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America (1993) offers readings of plays in production, film, performance art, photographs, anthropological displays, cartoons, acrobatic acts, and museums. He has published over forty scholarly articles and reviews in refereed journals. In addition, Moy has lectured internationally from Nanjing and Hong Kong to Ulan Ude, Stockholm, Venice, London, Thessaloniki, and Tampere.
Moy is a former editor of Theatre Journal (Johns Hopkins University Press). He has contributed to curatorial teams for gallery exhibitions, most recently an International Center for Photography show in New York City of photographs relating to race entitled "Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self" (12-12-03 to 2-29-04). He recently participated as an invited panelist in "The Modern/Postmodern Dialectic: American Art and Culture, 1965-2000," an innovative on-line symposium moderated by Maurice Berger, and co-sponsored by The Vera List Center for Art and Politics (New School University, NYC) and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center (Santa Fe). Moy continues to serve on panels and convenings for the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and various American educational and accreditation organizations.
He is most proud of his students. Recently, two of Moy's Ph.D. dissertators were awarded Fulbright Fellowships to conduct research abroad. And, his former students have served on the faculties of Duke University, University of Michigan, University of Iowa, Catholic University, University of California (San Diego, Santa Cruz, Irvine, and Riverside), College of Holy Cross, and many others across America and abroad.
Moy has taught at the University of Texas (Austin), the University of Oregon, and Northwestern University. He was Chairman and Professor with the Department of Theater and Drama at the University of Wisconsin¡XMadison, a program he served for over twenty years. In 2003 he left the University of Wisconsin to become Dean of the College of Fine Arts, and Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of New Mexico, posts that he vacated to join the administration of the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. |
