Her research focuses on modern Chinese literature, cinema, and theater, with a specific emphasis on texts traveling across temporal and medial boundaries. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include Chinese language, literature, cinema, and spoken drama, as well as literary translation.

She is the Chinese translator of Raymond Carver’s collection Call If You Need Me (Nanhai Publishing, 2023). She contributed a “Visual Resources” list to How to Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2022). Her reflections on and practice of sanqu song translation can be found in “In Search of Pure Sound: Sanqu Songs, Genre Aesthetics, and Translation Tactics,” a multi-author essay in the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture. Her reading of The Peony Pavilion (2001) was published on the Chinese Theater Collaborative digital resource center.

Yao has a B.A. in teaching Chinese as a foreign language (now international Chinese language education) from Shanghai International Studies University, and an M.A in East Asian languages and civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. degree in East Asian languages and literatures at The Ohio State University, where she also taught Chinese language and East Asian Humanities courses, and worked for the Translation and Interpreting Program.