Jay Needham is an artist, writer/editor, and educator. As a multi-instrumentalist and visual artist, he creates sound art, music, productions for radio, visual art, performances, and installations that activate listening as a vital component of artistic perception. Through his works, he explores themes of militarism, surveillance, family archives, ecology, and autoethnography that are often informed by his life-long experience with hearing loss.   

His sound art, works for radio, and visual art have appeared at museums, festivals, and on the airwaves worldwide including the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Darmstadt, Gemany), Art and Communication Festival (Riga, Latvia), New Media Scotland (Edinburgh, Scotland), Deep Wireless (Toronto, Canada), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki, Finland), FILE Hipersonica (São Paulo, Brasil), Third Coast Audio Festival (Chicago, USA), dLux Media Arts-Sydney Opera House (Sydney, Australia), and the International Festival of Antarctic Arts and Culture (Buenos Aires, Argentina). His installation documenting the sounds of Neotropical rainforests is on permanent display in the BioMuseo, designed by Frank Gehry, in the Republic of Panama.

Needham’s approach to art and scholarship is decidedly transdisciplinary, reflecting his belief that necessary and lasting artistic messages can be crafted through the combination of attentive research, artistic intent, and the risk involved in working toward change. His mythemes and output are influenced by his experiences alone on extended travels in wild spaces and in his family’s backyard in Southern Illinois.

He has given invited presentations of his work at many notable programs including the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, 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.

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