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.

Yao is an artist working across immersive installation, performance, projection mapping, and dance and technology. Using motion capture, sensors, and projection, she builds live environments where body, light, and code move together, treating the audience as a participant rather than a spectator.

Her recent immersive ritual performance Rain Rite, a reinterpretation of the ancient Nuoxi rain ceremony in multimedia projection, dance, and real time audio, was presented at CICA Art in Action in New York (2025). Her earlier work has shown at festivals, galleries, and performance venues internationally. #HashtagProject, an interactive theater piece on life under algorithms, appeared at the Transmediale Festival in Berlin. Choreographic Intervention, where a dancer's silhouette drives projected light, was performed at Morph with NYU's Tisch Dance MFA program. Googie, a real time motion capture dance experiment, was presented at XLab@Oath with San Francisco's Kinetech Arts. Color Fluid (色彩流体), a sensor driven installation of merging color, showed in the group exhibition Don't Quit Your Daydream at 798 Man Space in Beijing. Her interactive design for Matters of Facts, at the Center for Performance Research in New York, was featured in New York Arts.