Yan Chen

Biography

Yan Chen currently serves as Programme and Impact Lead at the Atlantic Institute, a partner programme of the Rhodes Trust, where she supports the community of global Atlantic Fellows who work to advance equity in various fields through community building, fostering collaborations, and designing and delivering learning experiences and events. Yan has worked extensively in the creative industries as a writer, editor, theatrical advisor, researcher, translator, and journalist. She has delivered projects in collaboration with leading theatre directors, writers, and Tony Award-winning theatres; served as Chief of Staff for a Y Combinator start-up, promoting financial inclusion; and organised local, national and trans-national efforts in education, communications, outreach, and community building. She is especially interested in civic engagement through the arts and humanities, and in making these fields more affordable and accessible for a wider range of people. Yan holds degrees in literature, theatre, and anthropology at Oxford, Harvard, and Nanjing Universities, where she researched cultural perspectives on loneliness, aging, and disease. Her education and training in China, the US, the UK, Russia, and Poland has been supported by the Rhodes Scholarship, the Oxford-China-Schwarzman Graduate Scholarship, the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship, and the Xu Xin Scholarship, among others.