The art of academics: NUS graduates on pursuing their artistic passions
July 14, 2025
Pursuing the arts is more than a pastime. As three NUS graduates from the Class of 2025 can attest, it’s a way of making sense of the world through media like theatre, fiction and poetry. Better yet, it has also enriched their time at NUS.
Jade Ow: Singapore’s trailblazing deaf actress
As a teenager, Jade Ow was always told that her voice was not “standard or conventional” enough for theatre. Born with moderate-severe deafness, she turned instead to visual arts, literature, and dance as outlets of expression.
But Jade still longed to break into theatre. In 2021, she decided to take a leap of faith and enrolled in Theatre Studies at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, with a minor in Chinese Translation.
“I had a really difficult time convincing people at first that I could go into theatre,” admitted the 23-year-old. Her family was also worried about the financial viability of theatre as a career.
Thankfully, she found a “support crew” at NUS. “Teachers came together to really help me with my journey, and I’m very grateful for them,” she shared. For instance, Dr Noorlinah Mohamed, who taught the course Voice Studies and Production, guided her through intensive voice and speech training in her second year.
The Student Accessibility Unit also equipped her with assistive speech-to-text technologies, helping her fill in the gaps when she lip-read during conversations and classes. They even connected her with theatre professionals, including director and disability arts advocate Peter Sau, who is currently her mentor in ART:DIS Singapore, a non-profit that advocates for opportunities for persons with disabilities within the arts scene. These experiences honed her craft and expanded her industry network.
By 2023, Jade had found not only her voice, but also her calling. Today, she has carved a niche for herself as one of Singapore’s few deaf actresses.
“Every chance to put myself out there is one step closer to where I want to be… It’s not really about achieving an Oscar or a 金马奖 (Golden Horse Award),” she said. “To me, the highest level of artistry is getting to that level where I feel satisfaction when I am performing.”
Her biggest role to date is her breakthrough autobiographical performance in Through The Looking Glass, directed by Claire Teo, and performed as part of the Light to Night Festival in conjunction with Singapore Art Week 2025. She credits NUS for providing a rare confluence of cultural diversity, academic freedom, and advocacy platforms. “I don’t think I could have gotten such a journey anywhere else in the world,” she noted.
Her family has since thrown their support behind her career choice. Post-graduation, she continues her journey as a theatre professional, while working with arts entities such as the National Gallery Singapore and the Singapore Drama Educators Association to promote disability arts in the region.
She also wishes to inspire other disabled artists. “I’m hoping to visit more special education schools, share my experience as an artist and disability advocate, and encourage students to see the arts as a path they can take too,” she said.
Ng Ziqin: Blending law with a love for writing
Ng Ziqin’s passion for the literary arts began before her NUS days. She started writing novels in secondary school, completing a coming-of-age novel, Every School a Good School, just before entering university. The book was a 2022 Epigram Books Fiction Prize finalist.
During her four years at NUS Law, Ziqin led University Court Friends, a pro bono project under the faculty’s pro bono group; served as Editor-in-Chief of its digital publication, Justified; and taught writing classes via Book-a-Writer, a programme started by literary non-profit SingLit Station.
For the 23-year-old, who lived on campus for two years under the NUS College (NUSC) programme, law and writing are two sides of the same craft. “NUS taught me what kind of lawyer — and person — I want to be,” she said. “I want to keep being someone who finds purpose in my job and maintains a personality and friends outside of work.”
At NUSC, she honed her short-story writing skills through the Global Experience (GEx) Paris programme, choosing a course centred on the arts, diplomacy, and social innovation. During the month-long programme, which included language classes and seminars, she found time to visit 18 museums in Brussels, Paris, Villers-Cotterêts and Giverny. This immersive journey inspired a collection of five short stories, titled Tales from the Pyramides, currently unpublished.
Ziqin even found a way to merge her interest in law and creative writing. For instance, she joined the scriptwriting team for Law IV, an annual musical traditionally staged by the graduating law cohort.
These creative projects are ways of “exploring authenticity”. This process is critical for Ziqin who “draws from lived experience” to pen her stories.
Ziqin will be preparing for the Bar exam in the coming months — but that doesn’t mean she is putting her creative work on the backburner.
When time allows, she hopes to spend the latter half of 2025 working on her next novel, about a university student stranded with a Chinese ethnic minority tribe during a trip to China.
The idea was sparked by her visit to Betel Nut Valley in Hainan, a lived experience she wishes to capture in writing.
Stephanie Peck: Finding purpose in poetry and psychology
In the quaint, seaside town of Swanage, England, with its chalk cliffs and sea breeze echoing with bird cries, Stephanie Peck and her friends came to a realisation: life was bigger than the woes they faced as secondary school students.
“It was so peaceful, our brains couldn’t handle it,” she said with a laugh.
“The adolescent period is not easy. (Psychologists) call it a period of storm and stress,” said Stephanie. Then 15, she was in Swanage to learn about geography. But the trip ended up sparking her curiosity about the human mind and mental health.
Now 23, she has traversed an eclectic academic journey. She initially enrolled in medicine, but eventually switched to psychology, along with a double minor in English Literature and Southeast Asian Studies at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. In hindsight, the arts was the right place as she grew creatively and academically.
During her five years in the College of Alice & Peter Tan (CAPT), a pivotal moment came in 2022 when she took the course Identities in Asia. It was taught by Senior Lecturer, Dr Kankana Mukhopadhyay, who encouraged the budding poet to submit poetry reflecting on the course’s field trips.
With Dr Kankana’s support, Stephanie launched “Beginner’s Guide to Writing Poetry”, the following year, a reading and writing group she facilitated within CAPT for her final three semesters. One participant, who had long wished to learn to write poetry but never had the chance, described the sessions as “an answered prayer”.
In 2024, Stephanie took her love for the arts abroad to Botswana for a two-month teaching internship at Delta Waters International School in Maun, a key partner of CAPT’s Study Trips for Engagement and EnRichment (STEER) programme. There she taught English, Literature, and Creative Writing to secondary and primary school students.
Post-graduation, Stephanie hopes to pursue clinical psychology, kickstarting her career in the mental health and social service sectors.
“What draws me to both poetry and psychology is their shared power to surprise — to shift a person’s perspective when they feel stuck. Sometimes, change begins with simply seeing things differently,” she said.