Zihan Xu

Zihan Xu is an anthropologist-creator, working at the intersection of mobilities, arts, and wellbeing. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where her OOC AHRC-funded doctoral research draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jingdezhen, China's porcelain capital, to explore how young migrants live well otherwise in a post-pandemic, anxious world. With an interdisciplinary background in creative media (BA, CUC), psychology (MA, Columbia), and medical anthropology (MPhil with Distinction, Oxford), Zihan also develops research-creation projects across ceramics, performance, installation, and audiovisual forms. Some of these practices come together in 'Drifting Alone Together', a co-creative twin project to her doctoral thesis, supported by the Public Engagement Starter Fund.