Ming Yuen S. Ma is a Los Angeles based media artist, and Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA.. He was born in Buffalo, New York and was raised in Hong Kong. His experimental videos and installations, including the ReCut Project (2006), THIS IS NOT A FOREIGN FILM (2002), Xin Lu Project (1997-present), Sniff (1997), Slanted Vision (1995), and Toc Storee (1992) have shown national and internationally in venues ranging for the Museum of Modern Art in New York to a tour bus driving around Los Angeles. As a curator and media activist, Ma co-directed (with Carol Stakenas) Resolution 3: Video Praxis in Global Spaces, which included a 3-day symposium, a traveling exhibition, and a book. Resolutions 3: Global Networks of Video (co-edited with Erika Suderburg, University of Minnesota Press, 2012) won SCMS’s (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) Best Edited Volume Award in 2014. He has worked with numerous media and arts organizations, including LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), LA Freewaves, Visual Communications, MIX/NYC, Foundation for Art Resources, Inc. (FAR), Highways Performance Space, American Film Institute, The Los Angeles Festival, MIX/NYC, and many others.

After producing experimental media for more than 20 years, Ma recently shifted his focus to writing and research. Ma’s new book, There is No Soundtrack: Rethinking Art, Media, and the Audio-Visual Contract (University of Manchester Press, 2020) is a study of how sound and image produce meaning in contemporary experimental media art. It argues that experimental media art produces radical and new audio-visual relationships challenging the visually dominated discourses in art, media and the human sciences. In addition to directly addressing what Jonathan Sterne calls 'visual hegemony', it also explores the lack of diversity within sound studies by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. Ma received a 2016 Art Writers Grant from Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation that supported his writing and research for There is No Soundtrack. Additionally, he has received support from previous project from American Film Institute, Art Matters, Brody Media Arts Fellowship, California Arts Council, Durfee Foundation, and other institutions. Ma himself has served as reviewer or jurist for Bloomsbury Academic, GLQ, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Visual Communications’ Armed with a Camera Fellowship, and other funding or publication bodies.

Artist Code: 012