Ming Chen is a tenured full professor and resident theatrical designer with 27 years of university teaching experience and three years of full time professional theatre experience. Born in Shanghai, China, she worked at Shanghai Youth Theatre Company in Shanghai and the Shakespeare Theatre at Folger in Washington, D.C.; and taught at SUNY at Buffalo in New York as well as Shanghai Theatre Academy in Shanghai before moving to Kennesaw, Georgia.

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As a scenic designer, Ming Chen's table works have been displayed at the Prague Quadrennial (co-design), Czechoslovakia, the USITT Design Expo in Long Beach, California, and China's National Stage Design Exhibition in Beijing and Tokyo. Her designs were seen at Atlanta Ballet, the national gala performances of the American College Dance Festivals at Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and Miller Theatre in New York City, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland, U.K., the Shanghai International Arts Festival and Shanghai Theatre Festival in China. In addition, her works were commissioned by many professional theatres in Atlanta including Kenny Leon's True Colors Theatre, the Alliance Theatre Company, the Horizon Theatre Company, 7 Stages and Theatre in the Square, as well as university theatres such as SUNY at Buffalo and Cornell University in New York.

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As a scholar, Ming Chen is the author of Visual Literacy for Theatre, a 565-page textbook on design (published in 2011). She is also a major contributor for ArtsTrends USA, a 347-page Chinese-English bilingual book on current topics in performance and design (published in 2017). Her other publications include essays and translations in top peer-reviewed professional journals such as Theatre Topics (co-author), TD&/T, Theatre Arts, and EPerformance. She has frequently presented papers at national and international theatre conferences and guest-lectured internationally.

 

Drawing from her cross-cultural experiences, she has directed and co-directed a number of cultural exchange projects that garnered grants and funds from government and private funding agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cultural Services of French Embassy, the Georgia Humanities Council, the French Consulate in Atlanta, the Confucius Institute, and the Coca Cola Foundation.