Umi Hsu (pronouns: they/them) was born in Taipei and moved to Virginia at age twelve. Hsu is a trans nonbinary sound artist, musician, and writer whose practice is driven by inquiries about sound and migratory communities. Working to create social change through sound, Hsu leads LA Listens, a community engagement project on LA’s changing sonic and social ecology; and mobile placemaking collective Movable Parts. They also perform and write songs about the melancholic postcolony in their LA-based ghost pop band Bitter Party. 

Hsu’s sound practice has been featured in LA Weekly, KCET, MIT Arts, Giant Robot, KCHUNG Radio, and Dublab, and presented by the Rubin Museum, Japanese American National Museum, CTM Festival in Berlin, Tuesday Night Cafe, 18th Street Arts Center, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, and MIT Community Innovators Lab. With a PhD in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia, they have received fellowships and awards from American Council for Learned Society, Shuttleworth Foundation, LA Metro, and National Endowment for the Arts.

Hsu is currently a 2023-24 Artist in Residence commissioned by 聽說 TingShuo in Taiwan. They also teach as an adjunct faculty member in the MFA in Media Design Practices program at ArtCenter College of Design, serve on the Advisory Board for The Invisible Archive journal, and previously worked as Director of Content Strategy at One Institute (formerly ONE Archives Foundation).