Ellen Chang

Ellen Y. Chang (she/her) is Director of Arts and Culture at the Taiwan Studies Program at the University of Washington and a doctoral candidate in Cinema & Media Studies. As both a film scholar and an art curator-practitioner, her research explores the intersections of contemporary Taiwanese video art and installation, cinema, and popular culture as sites of aesthetic decolonization. More recently, her work on sound, listening, and audio walking investigates embodied and practice-based approaches to understanding how audiovisual art reflects and refracts the textures of everyday politics across diasporic and transnational geographies. Her dissertation, Unseen Sounds, Unheard Images: Daomin, Aesthetic Decolonization, and Contemporary Moving Images in Taiwan, examines how contemporary Taiwanese audiovisual practices reimagine decolonization through sound, listening, mobility, and archipelagic worldviews.

Her multimedia project, Untitled Vignettes: Multisensory Encounter, Audiovisual Symphony, and the Contemporary Multimedia Art of Taiwan, received the 2019 Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship from the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities. In 2020, she served as Managing Editor of Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal and continued to contribute to UW Taiwan Studies initiatives, including the 2020 workshop Land/scaping Taiwan: (Non-)Humans, Environment, and Moments of Encounter. She has also been an active member of the Body and Media Graduate Research Cluster and an organizing member of the Feminist Writing Graduate Research Cluster, both supported by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Extending these interests into the classroom, Ellen is deeply committed to collaborative learning and interdisciplinary pedagogy. During the 2020–2021 academic year, she was awarded a Collaborative Learning and Interdisciplinary Pedagogy (CLIP) Fellowship in the Department of Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington, where she co-taught the collaborative course series Performing City: Sensorial Investigations & Praxes. The series encompassed three interconnected courses—“Monsters” on/off Screen: Horror Genre and Beyond; Diasporic (Re-)envisioning of Social Movements: Multisensory Encounter and Multimodal Research; and Embodied Modes of Research: From Cityscape to Cityscaping—and explored experimental, collaborative, and embodied approaches to knowledge production. Since 2022, she has developed and taught the Made in Taiwan course series for the UW Jackson School of International Studies, bringing together history, media, popular culture, social movements, environmental justice, gender and sexuality studies, and Indigenous perspectives through an audiovisual and discussion-based approach to learning. Most recently, her course proposal, Seeing and Sounding Power: Media and Decolonization in Taiwan, received the 2026 Taiwan Studies Course Development Award from the Taiwan Education and Research Program (TERP) at the George Washington University Sigur Center for Asian Studies.