Alex Chang

ALEX CHANG is an electric acoustic harpist and composer. Her musical practice finds its foundations in free jazz, indie rock, Celtic and new music, and her classical training. She explores entanglements and embodied practices through the concepts of free jazz and improvisation and the ways in which music moves through us and puts us in relation and dialogue with others. Her interest in interdisciplinary collaborative practices attends to how improvisation opens up our sentience, our emotional and empathic relations around us and beyond as intertwined beings for connection and healing. Within her interdisciplinary practice, she focuses on the arts, humanities, and environment.

She is part of the Rock City Falls Trio, a cross-genre ensemble that often works interdisciplinary through collaborative improvisation. She recently completed a Jazz and Sonic Music residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity for performance and composition and premiered the work A Shared Woven Melody at the Jazz and Sonic Arts Concert as part of their 2024 Gather Listen Hear Summer Arts Festival. She was awarded the 2025 Art Connects Artist Grant. Art Connects is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts & New York State.

Alex is Associate Professor of Practice in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media, conducting research and teaching courses on Eco Art, Global Jazz and Art, Global Asias Art and Visual Cultures, Curatorial Studies, Decolonizing Practices, Digital Humanities, and Web3. She is Associate Director at the Clement A. Price Institute and the Associate Director of the American Studies Program at Rutgers University-Newark. She is also on the Executive Committee of the Institute on Research on Women. She organizes the Decolonizing Curatorial and Museum Studies and Public Humanities Project (DCMP), the Our Newark Futures community gatherings at the Newark Public Library, and is co-founder of the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures the Americas journal (ADVA) and director of the Virtual Asian American Art Museum (VAAAM). She is author of Envisioning Diaspora: Asian American Arts Collectives (2008 Timezone8) and editor of Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art (Duke University Press 2018). She directed the Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange (GAX) from 2013-2025 in Shanghai, China; Hong Kong; and Wollongong, Sydney, and Canberra, Australia (2013); Washington DC and New York City (2014); Tokyo and Honolulu (2015); Buenos Aires (2017); London and Berlin (2018); Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal) (2019); Aotearoa (2020, virtual); virtually (2021); Venice (2022); and Taiwan (2025).

She is also the co-director of Improv Spaces and runs the Improv Spaces Music Festival with creative partner percussionist Adam Forman. Improv Spaces is based in upstate New York in Saratoga County and Capital Region, developing projects that can help to serve as a hub in the region and provide resources for new music with a community of interdisciplinary collaborators locally and beyond. Improv Spaces is in residence with Saratoga Arts and recently premiered their project Sonic Explorations in Troy in 2025 which was an incubator project for their artist-in-residency at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall .

Some exhibitions she has curated include Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art (2017-2018, co-curated with Steven Wong, Getty PST II: LA/LA, Chinese American Museum and California African American Museum), Dark Roads: Zarina Hashmi (co-curated with the artist, NYU A/P/A Institute 2017-18), (ex)CHANGE: History Place Presence (curator, six Pew-funded public art commissions across the city of Philadelphia, Asian Arts Initiative, 2018), Mixed (co-curated with the artist CYJO, NYU Kimmel Windows, 2019), Ming Fay:Beyond Nature(curator, Sapar Contemporary, 2019), What is Feminist Art? (curatorial committee, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 2019-2021), Imagining Justice: Asian American Art Movements (co-curated with Manabu Yahagi, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2022), and Books and Things: The Studiolo of kate-hers RHEE (curator, Paul Robeson Gallery, Express Newark, RU-N, 2022).

Photo by Jessica Tomaselli.