Lau is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies with cross-disciplinary training in Performance Studies and Women & Gender Studies. Their research focuses on how trans of color and queers of color negotiate their/our identity and embodiment across time and space, and the performance practices of resistance, refusal, and joy that result. Lau's interdisciplinary dissertation engages with scholars in the fields of critical ethnic studies, performance studies, and Black queer studies in order to develop a new critical theory they call聽recovecos(Spanish for nooks, hidden turns, and twists). Recovecos examines the ways that trans of color embody multiple realities and exceed colonial reality鈥檚 limitations across space and time. Lau's doctoral work seeks to offer insightful critiques and theoretical interventions in the emerging and promising field of trans of color studies/critique as their work proposes a multi-dimensional analysis of power, an in-depth approach to the crucial junctures of colonialism, time, and racial formation, and a practical decolonial offering聽for聽and not against聽trans life. Lau is also a performer and fiction writer.