Bio
Umi Hsu (pronouns: they/them) is a public humanist, digital strategist, and audio producer. Previously, Hsu led content as the Director of Content Strategy at One Institute (formerly ONE Archives Foundation) and directed design strategy, digital and data initiatives at the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. They have published extensively on digital media, data, and Internet culture and taught at ArtCenter College of Design in the Media Design Practices MFA program, University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, and Occidental College.
Hsu has received fellowships and awards from National Endowment for the Arts, American Council for Learned Society, Shuttleworth Foundation, GovTech, and LA Metro. They have advised Arts for LA, Digital Transgender Archive, The Invisible Archive journal, Center for Cultural Innovation, Cultural Research Network, LA Counts, and Society of Ethnomusicology. As a consultant, Hsu has worked with clients such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT).
Connect on LinkedIn.
In the Media
- Inside the growing movement to digitize LGBTQ+ stories: ‘We’re reverse-engineering new memories’ of the past. LA Times.
- Our Roles as Storytellers. People Nerds podcast, presented by dscout.
- Explore Queer Design History through Days of Rage. It’s Nice That.
- Balancing Content Creation with Serving Core Audience. Listen, Learn, Connect: Cultural Organizations and Digital Strategy in the COVID-19 Era. Published by Wyncote Foundation.
- Learning From Lived and Living History. LA Weekly
- Let’s Not Be Afraid of Each Other. MARCH.
- Community Profile: Umi Hsu. Interview with LA Counts, California Community Foundation.
- Mapping the unmapped: Umi Hsu on making culture meaningful and equitable. Dscout, People Nerds interview.
- Visualizing Arts Data for a Better World. LA Weekly.
- Umi Hsu on Innovations in Data Collection. Grantmakers in the Arts, Voices from the Field Podcast.
- A Conversation Between Umi Hsu and Judy Toretti: the story behind making an arts data tool. ArtCenter College of Design, Designmatters Blog.
- Cultural Treasures in the Neighborhood? They’re all over L.A., USC News.
Selected Articles I’ve written
- Lessons on Digital Humanities from the Civic Sphere, an article on public benefit design projects, a book chapter in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2016)
- Performative Data: Cultures of Government Data Practices, an academic article on the culture of open government data with a case study from Los Angeles, co-authored with Morgan Currie (2019)
- A Performative Digital Ethnography: Interface, Database, and Speculation, an academic article on the value of dynamic and speculative design when working with cultural data, a chapter in edited volume The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography (2017).
- The civic pitfalls and potentials of Pokemon Go, an article about the unintended civic consequences of AR in public spaces
- A people-centered approach to innovation, a blog post about the reasons behind establishing city staff design/digital incubator
- Open Sourcing Cultural Affairs, an article about the open source web design project at City of Los Angeles
More publications on music and my academic research are listed on my Google Scholar profile.