Layna Xiaoli Wang (they/them) is a Chicago-based sound artist, composer, and interdisciplinary performer exploring the physicality of sound, sensation, and improvisation. Their work engages with graphic notation, site-responsive performance, extended vocal technique, and dissolving the boundaries between composition and improvisation, structure and spontaneity, performer and audience.

Through a process-driven, tactile approach, Wang works with sound as a sculptural material—something to be pressed into, stretched, broken down, and transformed. Their performances and installations examine the friction between control and surrender, incorporating resonant objects, movement, and improvisation to create sonic environments that feel embodied, immediate, and immersive.

A multi-instrumentalist, Wang works across viola, piano, voice, and electronics, often experimenting with unconventional instruments and found objects to expand their sonic palette. Their practice also includes digital sound art and live coding, using real-time processing and algorithmic composition to create unpredictable, evolving sonic structures.

Wang is also immersed in Chicago’s opera and experimental music communities. They have performed in productions with Thompson Street Opera Company and worked with the Experimental Sound Studio. Their recent project bathtime?, a partially improvised, ensemble-edevised production, explored the blurred lines between intimacy, power, and presence in performance.

Beyond their artistic practice, Wang is deeply invested in interfaith collaboration and social engagement through the arts. As the founder of Interwoven Arts, Wang develops research-based projects and interdisciplinary curricula that use sound as a tool for deep listening, improvisation, and collective meaning-making.

They studied musicology, global studies, and voice performance at Lawrence University under the tutelage of Estelí Gomez, Karen Leigh-Post, Margaret Paek, and Sonja Downing. In 2021, they conducted archival research on Beethoven and his contemporaries in Vienna, Austria, co-creating the first digitized edition of Symphonie in c-Moll by Anton Reicha under the guidance of musicologist John Wilson. The work was premiered by Beethoven Orchester Bonn in March 2024.

They are currently based in Chicago, developing new works and seeking commissions, collaborations, and performances at the intersection of sound art, improvisation, and interdisciplinary performance.