Zihe Catherine Tian is a New York-based theater producer, dramaturg, investor, consultant, and cross-cultural artist working across commercial theater, nonprofit theater, opera, new plays, and international performance. Born in Beijing, she began training in Peking Opera and classical Chinese dance at the age of five before moving to the United States at eleven. Educated between Chinese classical performance traditions and Western theater, she has spent much of her life in between languages, cultures, and theatrical systems, a position that continues to shape the way she makes, develops, and understands performance. She is the Founding Partner of XYZ Theatricals LLC and the Vice Board Chair and Managing Director of Shall See Theater.

Her work lives between producing and dramaturgy. As a producer, Zihe is drawn to projects that carry both artistic force and public urgency — stories that ask how identity, history, power, migration, and cultural memory shape the way people live together. At the same time, she believes deeply in narrative, character, and the craft of storytelling. Her work respects the audience’s right to be moved, entertained, challenged, and to arrive at their own understanding of a story.

As a dramaturg and cultural consultant, she approaches theater as a process of translation beyond language: a practice of making meaning travel across bodies, traditions, institutions, audiences, and systems of value. Her work often begins from the question of what must be translated, what must remain culturally specific, and what kinds of theatrical form can hold both difference and recognition.

Rooted in both Chinese and American theatrical contexts, Zihe is committed to building relations without collapse, and recognition without simplification. Her practice is shaped by Chinese culture, opera, Hanfu, classical performance, literary adaptation, and contemporary production, allowing her to move between embodied cultural research and practical production strategy. Whether developing new work, supporting cross-cultural productions, or building international pathways for performance, she is interested in theater as a place where cultural specificity becomes not a barrier, but a source of power, beauty, and connection.

BA: NYU 
MFA: Columbia