Jay Afrisando is a composer, multimedia artist, researcher, and educator.

Through multisensory and antidisciplinary practice, he works on aural diversity, disability, accessibility, and decolonizing arts, manifested in music-theater, film, installation, witty storytelling, and other genre-bending experiences.

Afrisando’s work advances aural diversity—or diversity of hearing-listening experiences and conditions—in arts. Described by award-winning journalist Jocelyn Frank as a multisensory artist, Afrisando investigates how aural diversity shapes our understanding of music, sound, and listening. It becomes the foundation that shapes his work, challenging the conventional disciplines and bringing arts closer and closer to culturally and historically discriminated communities of listeners and makers.

In his work, he carefully pays attention to access as artistic resources and diverse methodologies to center crip practices. His lived experience as a neurodivergent has created intimate relationships with captions and cross-sensory listening practice. Through collaborations with aurally diverse and disabled artists, curators, and listeners, 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 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 issues of 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 TanzFaktur (DE), daadgalerie (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 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 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 Afrisando, a medium-skin-toned male with bunned hair, sits on outdoor neighborhood concrete steps in a serious pose, with his fingers clasped and arms on his thighs. He wears dark blue jeans, a light gray sweatshirt, and black shoes. Photo: © DAA

Jay Afrisando, a medium-skin-toned male with bunned hair, sits on outdoor neighborhood concrete steps in a serious pose, with his fingers clasped and arms on his thighs. He wears dark blue jeans, a light gray sweatshirt, and black shoes. Photo: © DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program / Diana Pfammatter.

Jay Afrisando, a medium-skin-toned male with his hair bunned, sits on top of a concrete fence in a neighborhood. He is looking at a black-in-yellow painted sign of a stroller and a kangaroo on the fence, indicating a sign of a ramp. Photo: © DAAD Art

Jay Afrisando, a medium-skin-toned male with his hair bunned, sits on top of a concrete fence in a neighborhood. He is looking at a black-in-yellow painted sign of a stroller and a kangaroo on the fence, indicating a sign of a ramp. Photo: © DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program / Diana Pfammatter.

Jay Afrisando, a medium-skin-toned male with his hair bunned, grins under the natural backlight of the sun. The wind blows some of his shorter hairlines. On his back are blurred dark green leaves in shadow. Photo: © DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program / D

Jay Afrisando, a medium-skin-toned male with his hair bunned, grins under the natural backlight of the sun. The wind blows some of his shorter hairlines. On his back are blurred dark green leaves in shadow. Photo: © DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program / Diana Pfammatter.

On a sunny day, Jay Afrisando, a medium-skin-toned male with his hair bunned, stands on a grass slope with some green leaves in shadow on his background. His body is slightly angled to his right, and his face gazes to the front. Photo: © DAAD Artists

On a sunny day, Jay Afrisando, a medium-skin-toned male with his hair bunned, stands on a grass slope with some green leaves in shadow on his background. His body is slightly angled to his right, and his face gazes to the front. Photo: © DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program / Diana Pfammatter.