Lei is an associate professor in the Department of Drama at University of California, Irvine. Her work focuses the ways in which gender and ethnic identities are enacted and nuanced in intercultural performance. In particular, she examines intercultural exchanges along the Pacific Rim and negotiations between Asian and non-Asian cultures through a powerful combination of literary, theatre studies, women’s studies and anthropological approaches.

Her first book Operatic China: Staging Identity Across the Pacific explores theatre and identity performance in the contact zones of late Qing political reforms and actors’ rebellions in China, the nineteenth-century Gold Mountain Chinatown of the Bay Area, and Chinese Americans’ amateur opera performance.  Her second book Alternative Chinese Opera in the Age of Globalization: Performing Zero examines tensions between local and global productions of experimental theatrical forms around the Pacific Rim.