Jay Afrisando (he/him) is an artist, researcher, educator, and curator.

His work investigates how aural diversity grounds the realities of our understanding of music, sound, and hearing-listening, and builds empathetic environments through collaboration and multisensory, antidisciplinary practice.

His work manifests in music-theater, film, installation, game, and other genre-bending experiences that intertwine critical frameworks with witty storytelling.

Described by award-winning journalist Jocelyn Frank as a multisensory artist, Jay examines how aural diversity, as a form of human diversity, challenges the conventional disciplines and centers culturally and historically discriminated communities of listeners and makers more in the arts.

In his work, he treats access as artistic resources and uses diverse methodologies to center crip practices. His lived experience as a neurodivergent has created intimate relationships of cross-media and cross-sensory listening practices. Through collaborations with aurally diverse and disabled artists, curators, and communities, his work celebrates neurodivergent, *deaf, and disabled modes of hearing-listening and builds empathetic listening in environments where his work takes place and beyond.

As a result, various forms and approaches are evident in his work: from a collaborative exhibition, a drama of captions as actors, a performative multisensory diary, a chain of access as a hearing-listening site, a multichannel film documenting aurally divergent experiences, an interplay between screenplay, captions, and audio descriptions, and no-audio music, among many.

His principle of decolonizing arts practices invites us to rethink our relationships with bodyminds and the world, and his ardency for being an artist who composes contexts and experiences leads him to make adventurous compositions that touch our daily lives. His previous works, dealing with reimagining cultures and experimenting with forms and relationships through improvisation, experimental notation, and revisiting definitions, have enriched and deepened his overall work.

His works have been presented at various spaces, including Galerie im Turm (DE), daadgalerie (DE), TanzFaktur (DE), ARTJOG (ID), UCSC Institute of the Arts and Sciences (US), Indexical (US), Curb Appeal Gallery (US), Sound Scene at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum (US), HERE Arts Center (US), ARGOS Centre for Audiovisual Arts (BE), Moon Palace Books (US), Attenborough Arts Centre (UK), Fridman Gallery (US), George Latimer Public Library (US), Saint Paul Union Depot (US), Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics/CCRMA (US), Cedar Cultural Center (US), Seattle Art Museum (US), Montalvo Arts Center (US), and National Gugak Center (KR).

He is the Atelier KITLV-Framer Framed Artist in Residence 2025-26, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin 2024 Fellow, a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow 2021-22, and a OneBeat Fellow 2015. He has received grants from the Hellman Fellowship 2026, the UCSC Arts Research Institute, the Next Step Fund 2023, the MAP Fund 2022, and the ABT Award 2020. He has been awarded the Ambassador’s Award for Excellence 2019 from the Ambassador of the Republic of Indonesia for the United States, the 2016 Minnesota Emerging Composer Award from the American Composers Forum, Hibah Seni Karya Inovatif (Innovative Artwork Grant) 2016 from Yayasan Kelola, and the 2nd Prize Winner of Prix Annelie de Man 2015 Composers Competition from Stichting Annelie de Man. Jay is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz.