Hi there! I'm An Xiao Mina. You can call me An or An Xiao (pronounced a little like "Ahn Shao"). I'm an American design strategist, new media artist, and digital community builder. I believe that art, design and technology can transform the lives of individuals, from developing nations to low-income communities to global arts audiences.

New here? Check out my CV/resume and my media highlights for a little more about me. If you like art, you can read two of my most influential essays on social media art: Twitter as an Artistic Medium and Surveying Social Media Art. Or you can watch my popular talk at Mindshare Los Angeles.

More into design? Social change? Check out my current focus, the Gwangju Design Biennale. Or you can just catch me online: I tweet often and Weibo almost as often.

More About Me (The Long Story)

I'm fascinated by "crowd-created art", the idea that we can use communications technology to empower the global arts community to create art, not simply view or participate. I've found that social media is often the best way to do this. In 2008, I developed a Twitter art project that helped kick off the Brooklyn Museum's 1stfans, the museum world's first socially-networked membership. I then founded @Platea, a social media art collective that explores the power of public art in the "digital megacity" of social media like Twitter and Facebook. We both create and commission social media-based works, and our members are based around the world. I also create a number of independent social media-based works.

I'm thrilled by the possibilities of technology and design. In 2010, I co-founded and co-direct a Chinese-to-English Twitter translation site. I currently work on the curatorial team of the Gwangju Design Biennale. We're exploring the role of "un-named design" by re-examining what design is and can be, from Kenyan mobile banking to prosthetic limbs. I touch on some of these issues for The Huffington Post. My interview with Tricia Wang about Chinese Internet cafes is a good example.

I'm very grateful to have received wide recognition for my work. My work has been featured and cited in The New York Times, The Guardian, the Wall St. Journal, ARTNews, Art in America, and others. I've written and spoken extensively about these issues from New York to Shanghai, in art, new media and academic spaces. My essays on social media art are making their way into academic syllabi, which makes me nerdily quite happy. You should read this one and this one to get the best sense of my ideas. Or you can read the column I started in Art21, or my work in the Brooklyn-based art blog Hyperallergic.

I grew up in the cultural melting pots of Los Angeles's Silverlake neighborhood and Manila, Philippines, and I've lived in New York City, Washington, DC, and Beijing. I myself am of mixed Filipino, Chinese and Spanish descent, with a German-Irish stepfamily. I'm doing my best to achieve conversational fluency in Mandarin and Spanish; I read both better than I speak them. I have a soft spot for the American Southwest and China's Northeast (东北), but I will always consider Los Angeles home and New York second home. I love hiking, swimming and cycling. I enjoy travel, for business or pleasure. I miss sleep.

Keywords

digital strategy, design strategy, social media art, Chinese language, developing world, community building, crowdsourcing, crowd creation, pizza, technology design, mobile phones, cool stuff, Twitter, Sina Weibo, social entrepreneurship, social enterprise

What's in a Name?

In the spirit of danah boyd's explanation of her name, I thought I'd talk about mine. My full name is An Xiao Mina. You can call me An, pronounced "Ahn" or "Anne", or An Xiao, pronounced "Ahn Shao". An Xiao (安小) is an artist name I chose to better reflect my ethnic and family background. Artist names have a long tradition in Asia and beyond, with poets like Ai Qing (艾青) and Basho (芭蕉) adopting names for their creative endeavors. The name stuck, and I decided to keep it for everyday life too. Put it all together, and it reflects my mixed background, with names I share with people from three different continents (four, if you count North America!).