Mimi Xu

Mimi Xu builds performances from sound—for stages, screens, and spaces built to listen.

London-based, her practice centers on site-specific mixed-media performance, staged at cultural destinations, including Meltdown Festival, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Barbican, Gagosian Gallery, and Oberlin Conservatory. She has collaborated with visual artists Carlota Guerrero, Weirdcore, and United Visual Artists, and with the legendary choreographer Lindsay Kemp—Marcel Marceau’s protégé and mentor to David Bowie and Kate Bush—before his passing. She featured in “REBEL: 30 Years of London Fashion” at the Design Museum, scoring its “Show” installation. “RESONANCE,” one of her current projects, treats sound as living sculpture: frequency, composition, and audience woven into one instrument.

She received a 2025 Sundance nomination for Best Original Score (“LUZ”) and ASCAP’s Composer Spotlight of the Year. As half of Awkward Moments, she recently recorded “V Elements: in residency at Max Richter’s Studio Richter Mahr.

She scores for fashion’s defining houses, has performed at Art Basel, Cannes, the Serpentine, and Berghain’s Panorama Bar, and her symphony “Sānshuǐ” premiered at Weiwuying, Taiwan’s National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts—a hall her father, acoustic architect Albert Yaying Xu, gave its sound.

Mimi Xu is an Onassis AiR Fellow for 2026/27.