Miso Chic, a PhD student at MIT brings an engineering mindset to the art of drag performance—and it’s paying off.

Miso Chic performed in drag for the first time at a Media Lab Pride party two years ago. By the following year, she was competing in The Big Competition, Boston’s premier drag competition at Club Café. The contest spanned three months, with events every other week requiring contestants to create two looks and one performance around a given theme and face a panel of celebrity drag judges. On the final night, on Pi day no less, Miso Chic took home the crown.

How did Miso go from an aspiring drag performer to the competition’s top prizewinner?

“It was an engineering mindset—a bias toward action. Fail fast and fail small,” she said. “I wasn’t encumbered by rules and expectations I set for myself, so I could learn along the way.”

Miso also credits the MIT community and the resources of the Metropolis makerspace. “I don't think my drag would be possible without the makerspace community,” she said.

Having access to tools, technical expertise, and project funding, allowed Miso to sew, solder, and weld elaborate creations that consistently stood out on stage. “I wanted to go hard. I had all these skills from being a maker, and growing up in academia, I had all these project-management skills.”

Her signature runway looks included a programmable fiber-optic gown that continuously changed colors, a fully feathered flamingo suit, and a gilded rose bodysuit emerging from black velvet. At Metropolis, members work on passion projects side by side, troubleshooting problems together—often late into the night. Having a space dedicated to multidisciplinary projects helped legitimize and support her creative work to bring the fantasy to life. She received a design-making mini grant and two Council for the Arts and MIT grants which allowed projects like the fiber optic gown to be born.

As a PhD student, Miso studies figure skating. She uses computational social science, computer vision, and cultural analytics to understand how scoring structures influence athletes’ artistic creativity, performance strategy, and evolution of the sport's aesthetic norms. Competitive figure skating also shares some common themes with the queer arts scene, notably the 10 point scoring system in ballroom that attempts to quantify artistic merit alongside technical rigor. “I'm interested in the space where creativity meets evaluation,” she said. “As both a researcher and a performer, I get to see the same problem from both sides—how we decide what counts as excellence and how people innovate to strive towards those ineffable virtues.”

“The challenge is how to focus. How do you create a moment on stage that resonates with people?" she said. "At first, I overthought things. But it's like presenting a flash talk at an academic conference—everything needs to be in service of a singular message. What idea do you want to leave the audience with?”

Now something of a local legend, Miso Chic also has a mission: bridging the worlds of art, queer culture, and technological literacy. In a recent Instagram post, she explains the mechanics of ChatGPT and large language models while dressed as Shrek. The video is funny, informative, highly engaging, and has attracted over 60,000 views.

“In the entertainment world, there's an expertise in communication and getting ideas across,” Miso said. “In the science and academic world, there’s such a focus on the work itself… As a drag artist and a PhD student, I have an opportunity to bridge those worlds.”

Miso also advocates for including people on the margins—those who fall outside the "normal distribution"—in data research.

“They see things about society that may be invisible to other people,” she said. “If you’re a fish in the ocean, you might not know what water is. Queer people often have unique insight into social systems because those systems don’t always align perfectly with their lived experiences.”

As Pride Month gets underway, Miso Chic has a lineup of performances where you can see her dance, sing, and perhaps even explain a complex concept or two. “June is going to be a busy month for me, but the rest of the summer, I’m excited to experiment a little more. Whether it’s with research or art, progress usually comes from giving yourself time to explore, iterate, and develop skills before you bring new ideas to the stage.”

Miso Chic’s Pride Month show dates

SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 12:00–3:00 PM
Drag me to ilona Drag Brunch
ilona Restaurant

SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 7:30–9:00 PM
Monochromatica: A Pride Drag Show
Club Cafe

SUNDAY, JUNE 21, Seatings 11:30 AM & 1:30 PM
Dani's Drag Brunch
Dani's Queer Bar

FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 8:00 PM–12:00 AM
PEM Pride Spaced out!
Peabody Essex Museum