Tsering Wangmo Satho (ཚེ་རིང་དབང་མོ་ས་མཐོ་) will present a taste of the richly diverse and distinctive performing arts of the Tibetan plateau, including styles such as Ache Lhamo (ཨ་ཅེ་ལྷ་མོ་ opera) from Lhasa, dranyen (སྒྲ་སྙན་ Tibetan lute) dance-songs from Lhasa, Tö, and Dingri; and dance-songs of Kongpo in South Tibet, which are accompanied by dranyen or just the stamping of the dancing singers’ feet. Tsering Wangmo first began learning traditional Tibetan performing arts from her parents in the Tibetan refugee community in South India where she was born. In 1983, she joined the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) in Dharamsala, India. She is knowledgeable, of ‘raw’ traditional Tibetan performing arts forms as well as those that have been developed by TIPA in more presentational and professionalized forms.

In 1989, she moved to the US and co-founded the traditional Tibetan performing arts troupe Chaksampa in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has toured India, the US, and internationally with TIPA and Chaksampa. Working with public and private funders, she has curated and performed in numerous large-scale Tibetan opera performances and festivals in the US. She has also worked particularly extensively to preserve and promote the Kongpo dance-songs and their sung poetry that she learned from her mother. In 2022, she gained recognition for her outstanding contribution to traditional artistic culture by being named a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) National Heritage Fellow. In 2026 she was appointed as the instructor of UCLA’s new Tibetan Music and Dance Ensemble.