Alexandra Chang

Alexandra Chang is the Director of Public Programs & Research Manager at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute research center at NYU. She is the co-organizer for both the Diasporic Asian Art Network (DAAN) and the East Coast Asian American Art Project (ECAAAP). ECAAAP is an inter-institutional collaborative research initiative, building archives on Asian diasporic artists who passed through, lived, and worked in New York City from 1900-2000. Her current research involves tracing the histories and shifts of the visual cultures and flows of Chinoiserie and Japonisme as a site of cosmopolitanism from pre-modern to contemporary visual art. She recently presented the paper “Visual Flows and the Art of Cosmopolitanism: Ma Jun, Tomokazu Matsuyama, David Diao and Patty Chang” at the University of Heidelberg Annual Conference 2009: Flows of Images and Media.

Her book Envisioning Diaspora: Asian American Visual Arts Collectives was released internationally by Timezone 8 Art Books with project partner A/P/A Institute at New York University in 2009. She has served as the Managing Editor for Art Asia Pacific magazine and Features Editor for amNew York. Chang served as the writer and analytical consultant on the groundbreaking comparative report “Asian American Arts in NYC: A Snapshot of Current Trends and Issues,” released in Fall 2009 by the Asian American Arts Alliance. Her writing has appeared in Art Asia Pacific, ArtKrush, Asiance magazine, Art in Asia, amNew York, Time Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and Rutger’s University’s Woman’s Art Journal among other publications. She has recently written monograph essays on the artists Tomokazu Matsuyama, Romon Kimin Yang, and José Parla, and is a contributor to the forthcoming Oxford University Press Encyclopedia for American Art.

She has produced over 100 hours of oral histories on Asian diasporic art and conducted the Godzilla: Asian American Art Network oral histories for the Art Spaces-Archives Project, Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies. Chang was the convener of and a panelist for the NYU Asian American Art Symposium 2009: “A Century of Asian American Art: Archives, Scholarship and Curation.” She was also chair for the 2007 Association of Asian American Studies panel on urban cross-cultures “Curating Identity in NYC.”

She has curated exhibitions and written on contemporary art, graffiti, design and architecture, including co-curating the current exhibition “Art, Archives, and Activism: Martin Wongʼs Downtown Crossings” at the 7th Floor Gallery at New York University (March-December 2009). She sits on the organizing committee for THE DROP and was the curator of the special exhibition “2012+” for THE DROP: Urban Art Infill art festival, an indoor and outdoor festival in Chelsea, NYC (www.thedropnyc.org). She was a co-founder of the artist collective Dream So Much and is a member of ArtTable.

Chang holds a Masterʼs from the NYU John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Masterʼs Program in Humanities and Social Thought with a concentration in Aesthetics and Asian American Art History.

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