Yao is an artist whose practice spans immersive installation, performance, projection mapping, and dance and technology. She builds live, responsive environments where the body, light, and code move together, treating the audience as a participant rather than a spectator. Working with motion capture, sensors, projection, and responsive systems, she makes technology that feels human, present, and alive.

Her recent immersive performance Rain Rite, presented at CICA Art in Action in New York (2025), interlaces multimedia projection, ritual dance, and real time audio interaction. Inspired by ancient Chinese cosmology, it invites the audience into a mythic journey between human will and the forces of nature, a liminal space where memory, myth, and technology converge. Her earlier work includes #HashtagProject, an interactive theater production presented at Transmediale Festival in Berlin, Choreographic Intervention, performed at Morph with NYU's Tisch Dance MFA program, and Googie, a 2018 public event made with the San Francisco nonprofit Kinetech Arts to explore how motion capture and dance can meet technology. She developed her practice at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Yao's professional work focuses on combining the digital and physical worlds, with the user at the center of the interaction. At Snap Inc., she designs and builds developer tools, samples, and AI-driven prototyping workflows on Lens Studio — shaping how hundreds of thousands of creators bring AR experiences to life. Before Snap, she was a Design Technologist at Samsung Research America's AI Center, prototyping experiences across voice, computer vision, robotics, and intelligent environments.

She was an invited AWE USA 2022 speaker on building fashion and retail AR experiences, has authored official Lens Studio tutorials on Snap's YouTube channel, and is a Red Dot Award recipient and a Lens Fest judge. Yao holds an MPS from NYU Tisch's Interactive Telecommunications Program and a BS in Psychology and Industrial Design from Zhejiang University — a foundation that anchors her technical work in human behavior and design thinking.