Long Bio

​

Michele Cheng is an interdisciplinary composer, multi-instrumentalist, improviser, and puppeteer intertwining music, visuals, and theatre to engage with social issues and cultural identities. Through a journalistic approach and intermedia storytelling, she develops creative work that shines light on underrepresented narratives. Examples of her work include: Doyennes' Diaries, an electroacoustic work with custom instruments and diaries from women-identified artists; A Different Reality, a creative project examining today’s world through lens of the youth; Jaack, a musical puppet theatre work for the JACK Quartet with custom puppets, interactive visuals, and a custom smart mirror; Speed Dating, a three-screen audiovisual work in ambisonics with puppetry about Asian American's dating culture; and OMW, a documentary film about four 1.5 gen Taiwanese-American artists in Greater Los Angeles.

​

She was a JACK Studio artist (2020-2022) commissioned by the JACK Quartet, a commissioned composer for National Sawdust’s Digital Discovery Festival; a recipient of New Music USA Creator Development Grants; and an associate artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts residency. Michele was a winner in Digital Music for the u19 Award, a media arts competition hosted by Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). u19 Award was modeled after the renowned u19- CREATE YOUR WORLD at Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, where she visited as a representative in 2007.

​

She has been featured internationally at MATA Festival (NYC, US), CCRMA Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (Stanford, US), ICMC International Computer Music Conference (Santiago, CL), ISSTA Irish Sound, Science & Technology Association (IE), Sonorities Festival Belfast (Belfast, UK), MANTIS Festival (Manchester, UK), 33 Officina Creativa ( Toffia, Italy), SICMF Seoul International Computer Music Festival (Seoul, KR), NYCEMF The New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYC, US), ESPACIOS SONOROS (Salta, AR), New Music Gathering (Portland, US), eavesdropping symposium (London, UK), TMAO Thailand Music and Art Organization (Bangkok, TH), Hot Air Festival (San Francisco, US), UCI Illuminations (Irvine, US), and LMCML Laboratoire de musique contemporaine de Montréal (CA).​​

​​​

Her works have been presented at Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon (France), Accidental Theatre (UK), Podium Gigant (Netherlands), Karol Lipiński Academy of Music (Poland), Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal (Canada), Seoul Arts Center (South Korea), National Theatre & Concert Hall (Taiwan), Bangkok Art & Culture Centre (Thailand), and throughout the United States at National Sawdust (Brooklyn, NY), Roulette (Brooklyn, NY), Bing Concert Hall (Stanford, CA), Orange County Museum of Arts (Santa Ana, CA), Experimental Media Performance Lab (Irvine, CA), Emerson Paramount Theatre (Boston, MA), among others.

​

She has worked with ensembles including International Contemporary Ensemble (US), JACK Quartet (US), orkest de ereprijs (Netherlands), Ensemble Instrumental de l'ESM Bourgogne-Franche-Comté (France), NOMON (US), TAK Ensemble (US), Stanford New Ensemble (US), alokori (Canada), Taipei Symphony Orchestra (Taiwan), Baroque Camerata (Taiwan), and Yunlin Sharing Chamber Orchestra (Taiwan) where she is a composer-in-residence since 2007. ​

 

As an improviser-performer, Michele plays piano/electric bass/electronics/percussion/drum and self-built instruments. She has shared the stage with artists including International Contemporary Ensemble, Sō Percussion, Taiko Center of Los Angeles, Antenna Fuzz, Stanford New Ensemble, Ensemble Evolution, Pamela Z, Craig Taborn, Claire Chase, Susie Ibarra, Joshua Rubin, and Levy Lorenzo, among others. She is a co-founder of the intermedia duo Meoark and fff, an interdisciplinary improv collective led by feminist media artists.​​​​​

​

Her essay "Reimagining Accessibility and Inclusivity in Virtual Events" (2021) was commissioned by the American Composers Forum for I Care If You Listen’s Casting Light series. Her journal paper "Multiverse: Reframing Vulnerable Realities through Intermedia Storytelling and Fluidity" will appear in Leonardo published by the MIT Press in 2026.

​

Dedicated to nurturing future innovators, she was a TK-3 music educator at public elementary schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, a program specialist at a children museum, and a teaching intern at Orange Coast College. As a teaching assistant, she has taught at School of the Arts and School of Education at the University of California, Irvine, the College of Arts & Sciences at Cornell University, and the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. She has given guest talks at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Western Ontario (UWO), National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU), National Chung Cheng University (CCU), and National Yunlin University of Science and Technology (NYUST).

​

Michele holds an M.F.A. in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology (ICIT) from the University of California, Irvine, working with Nicole Mitchell, Michael Dessen, Chris Dobrian, Kojiro Umezaki, and Lukas Ligeti. She received her B.F.A. in Music Production/Theory and Composition from National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan where she worked with Szu-Hsien Lee and Kwang-I Ying. She is currently a PhD fellow in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry (CPCI) at Harvard University.