Rosalyn Shih

B.A. Columbia University, English Literature

As the daughter of Hong Kong immigrants to Canada, Rosalyn grew up speaking English and Cantonese. She spent her childhood mainly in Hong Kong, and went on to study English Literature at Columbia University, obtaining a New York State Teaching Certificate in Adolescent Education (English Language Arts) and student-teaching at the Bronx School of Law and Finance. During college, she also studied abroad at Oxford University.

After graduation, Rosalyn became a Teaching Fellow at the Urban School of San Francisco. She then moved to Beijing in 2012, where she offered academic and college counseling for Chinese high school students planning on attending university in the United States. More recently, she has studied Classical Chinese and Qing-era literature at the IUP program at Tsinghua University.

Rosalyn lives in the hutong (ancient courtyard) neighborhood in central Beijing where her neighbors raise pigeons and plant vines that climb across the telephone wires in the summer. In her spare time, she leads workshops and teaches classes at Beijing Contact Improvisation, a community-based dance organization she co-founded in 2014.