Jay Needham

Jay Needham is an artist, musician, researcher, writer-editor and cultural producer who utilizes multiple creative platforms to produce his works, many of which have a focus on sound and site specific field research. As a hearing-divergent person, Needham explores present and emerging ecologies of the electromagnetic spectrum that often feature the sense of sound and vibration as a component in the interpretation of his works.     

His sound art, productions for radio, visual art, performances and installations have appeared at museums, festivals and on the airwaves, worldwide. His most recent sound installation is on permanent display in the BioMuseo, designed by Frank Gehry in The Republic of Panama.

Needham is the editor of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, published by The University of California Press. His writing appears in the books Hearing Places: Sound, Place, Time, Culture and Moving Sounds: A Cultural History of the Car Radio. Additionally, his writings have been published in the journals, Exposure, Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology and Leonardo Music Journal. Professor Needham is also a member of the Humanities and Social Science Expert Group with the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) and he is also a member of the Library of Congress’s Radio Preservation Task Force. Additionally, he is the Director of Graduate Studies for the MFA program in the School of Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

He has been invited to speak and present his work at many notable programs including the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, California Institute of the Arts and the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. He received his MFA from The School of Art at California Institute of the Arts in 1989 where he studied with Allan Sekula,Douglas Crimp, Thom Andersen and Krzysztof Wodiczko.