Emilia Yang

Emilia Yang is a Central American artist, memory organizer and researcher. Her art practice utilizes expanded forms of digital media (XR, transmedia, web, interactive, films, archives, performance, games and public interventions) for the creation of community-based feminist, anti-racist and transformative justice projects.

Her practice-based research explores the role of memory, violence, emotions, performance, and participation in the political imagination. She serves as the Director of “AMA y No Olvida, Memory Museum Against Impunity,” a conceptual, transmedial and community memory museum that explores participatory forms of art and design for remembering and demanding justice for the victims of state violence in her home country Nicaragua.

Yang earned her PhD in Interdisciplinary Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern California and her Masters of Arts in Communications at Pennsylvania State University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at University of Michigan's Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design with a focus on Anti-Racism by Design. At U-M she is affiliated with the Digital Studies Institute, the Center for Ethics, Society and Computing, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Latinx Studies Program in the American Culture Department.

In 2021 Emilia was granted the New Latin American Voices Award at the New Images Festival hosted by the Forum des images in Paris. In 2022, she was selected as a Public Art and Engagement Fellow by U-M Arts Initiative, University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), and Monument Lab, and in 2023 she was selected as an Arts for Gender Equality Fellow by the Rockefeller Foundation and CARE, which also included her selection as a 2023 Bellagio Center Resident by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Yang’s theory-practice work has been published in the Memory Studies Journal (Sage), International Journal of Communication (USC Press), Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, The Additivist Cookbook (Institute of Network Cultures), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change (NYU Press) and Practicing Futures: A Civic Imagination Action Handbook (Peter Lang Press).

Articles about her work have been featured in multiple international news outlets, such as France 24, The Art Newspaper, Artnews, KQED, Arts, VICE, Univision, Deutsche Welle, El País, CNN, and EFE.