About
An interdisciplinary performance maker and director, Zya approaches her practice through curiosity, collaboration, and a fascination with how stories live within bodies, relationships, and shared experience. Her practice moves across immersive, devised, and text-based performance-making, often drawing on embodied and sensory approaches, ritual dramaturgy, and participatory processes to create performance experiences that are intimate, exploratory, and responsive to the artists, audiences, and worlds they encounter.
Zya Kane is a Chinese Malaysian/Australian artist, theatre maker, director, and inclusive arts practitioner with over 25 years of experience across performance, devising, teaching, sensory research, and a creative practice shaped through collaborative exchange with artists and communities. She works across theatre, interdisciplinary and experiential forms, and installation and immersive environments bringing a strong focus on relational storytelling and audience connection. Her artistic approach is shaped by cultural and sensory hybridity, with an ongoing interest in layered storytelling and olfactory approaches within her performance language.
Alongside her professional practice, Zya is undertaking a Master of Theatre Directing at the Victorian College of the Arts, deepening her exploration of directing across text-based, devised, and interdisciplinary forms. Her directing approach draws on sensory elements, physical performance approaches, and environmental design to build layered performance worlds that invite intimacy, presence, and dynamic audience engagement.
Zya has an ongoing collaborative relationship with Born in a Taxi, contributing as a performer and creative collaborator within ensemble-led, physically driven, participatory, and experimental performance processes. She also works with Weave Movement Theatre, where she co-devises performances, directs, facilitates workshops, and supports the creative leadership of artists. She is co-artistic director of FUZE, a performance ensemble with YourDNA Creative Arts, collaborating with neurodivergent and disabled artists to devise original work and support creative agency.
Internationally, she has collaborated with Teatro de los Sentidos in Spain on immersive theatre and installation environments and worked as Assistant Director to Michiko Gaulier (École Philippe Gaulier / ITAP, Paris). She performed in the 2023 MAP Performance Festival in Melaka, Malaysia, and is a current member of the Maroondah Arts Advisory Committee.
Her training spans physical theatre (Lecoq), improvisation, butoh, somatic and sensory performance practices, acting, and body-based performance methodologies, with a particular interest in scent as a dramaturgical tool for emotional landscapes and memory-driven storytelling.
Zya’s artistic practice is guided by inclusivity, cultural hybridity, and a continuing curiosity about how live performance can hold connection, ancestral presence, collective imagination, humour, and moments of transformation.